Andrew Cunningham
For several months, Intel has been investigating reports of high-end 13th and 14th Gen desktop CPUs (mainly but not limited to the Core i9-13900K and 14900K) crashing during gameplay. Intel has now partially resolved this issue. Assert Third-party motherboard makers are adhering to Intel’s recommended default power settings on their motherboards, but the company said it is still working to identify the root cause of the issue.
The company announced yesterday that it has concluded its investigation and that a microcode update that fixes the issue is expected to be shipped to motherboard manufacturers in mid-August “after full validation.” Since such microcode updates typically require a BIOS update, when the patch will be applied to specific motherboards will depend on the company that created it.
Intel said that its analysis of the flawed processors “confirmed that the increased operating voltage was caused by a microcode algorithm sending an incorrect voltage request to the processor. ” In other words, the CPU was receiving too much power, which was causing it to become less stable over time.
If you have a 13th or 14th generation CPU and are not having issues, a microcode update may help prevent processor degradation. However, if you are already noticing stability issues, Tom’s Hardware Reports “The bug causes irreversible degradation of affected processors,” so a fix cannot undo damage that has already been done.
There’s no mention that 12th Gen processors, including the Core i9-12900K, suffer from the same issue. 12th Gen processors use Intel’s Alder Lake architecture, while the higher-end 13th and 14th Gen chips use an improved architecture called Raptor Lake, which has higher clock speeds, a bit more cache memory, and additional E-cores.
Tom’s Hardware also says that Intel will continue to replace the affected CPUs, and that the microcode update will not have a noticeable impact on the CPU’s performance.
Intel too Separately It confirmed speculation that some early 13th-gen Core processors had oxidation-related manufacturing issues, but that the issue was fixed in 2023 and was not related to crashes or instability that would be fixed by a microcode update.
