• 0 Posts
  • 15 Comments
Joined 10 days ago
cake
Cake day: April 5th, 2025

help-circle

  • @marauding_gibberish142 I personally find the Intel ME a useful feature, it’s nice for example to be able to upgrade BIOS without a CPU and/or memory, this has allowed me for example to upgrade the BIOS to a version needed for a newer CPU on a board with a BIOS that didn’t initially support it without needing the older CPU to perform the upgrade. And from a security standpoint, if you do not enable and configure the network stack, and you don’t have a DHCP server available to it for it do so on it’s own, I really don’t see what it can do that is harmful.


  • @jeena I grant you that is true, but under Linux, the kernel talks to the hardware directly after boot, not through BIOS calls. About the only time you would talk to the BIOS after boot is for sleep/suspend, or in rare cases such as the server my friendica instance runs on, for temp/CPU speed control because Linux kernel has issues properly using the MSR on the i9-10980xe, oddly it does not seem to have the same issue on the i9-10900x which is a ten core CPU in the same family, so I am forced to depend upon ACPI since talking to the hardware directly in this specific case is problematic. If you were running Windows or if you had weird hardware that is somewhat broken under Linux like mine, I can see the need, or if a laptop and you wanted sleep/suspend functionality. But for what you describe it isn’t clear the benefits. And there are some risks like it probably isn’t going to do the extensive memory training of a more advanced UEFI bios like American Megatrends, so your memory access may not be as efficient as it could be, and you’re more limited in hardware selection.



  • You can MANUALLY set the voltage on your motherboard lower, for me this is just part of installing a new system, I always use prime95 or mprime on Linux to fully load it and find the absolute minimal voltage the CPU is stable at. We did this with my sons i7-13900k and have never had an issue even though he beats the holy hell out of the machine with gaming and we got it early one right after the chips release. CPU’s are a silicon lottery game and if you just let it set things you’re going either give up efficiency or CPU life over what you get determining optimum settings manually. If you happen to get a chip near the center of the die it will run faster and at lower voltage than one near the outside, but since the manufacturer has to assume the worst, they will specify a voltage that is adequate to run the chip at the rated speed even if it is one of the poor quality chips from the outer edges of the die, the result is excessively cooking your CPU way more than you need to.