Hey, just want to chime in and say that baking without exploding is broken in 2.5 at the moment. I tried baking my model and I got a bunch of artifacts in intersections, I reverted back to 2.4.1 and it worked fine with the same settings. I described the problem with screen grabs in this Polycount thread:
http://polycount.com/discussion/comment/2526693#Comment_2526693Thank you!