A game developer has published a report that claims Intel has been selling defective CPUs to users. Alderon Games says that some stability issues seem to be affecting Intel's 13th and 14th gen K/KF/KS chips.
What's wrong with Intel 13900k and 14900k CPUs?
This is not the first time that the Raptor Lake chipsets have been found to be unstable. A bulletin published by Unreal Engine's RAD Game Tools in April this year attributed Oodle decompression failures to the instability of Intel processors. The statement highlighted that the problem was due to high clock rates and power usage of the CPUs, i.e. overclocked processors.
The report by Matthew Cassells, the Founder of Alderon Games, reveals that several users who played the company's multiplayer dinosaur survival game, Path of Titans, ran into a lot of problems such as crashes, instability, and memory corruption. Alderon analyzed the crash reports and identified the failures in 5 areas.
Users were experiencing crashes on Intel 13th and 14 Gen CPUs while playing the game. The game's developers were also running into instability when they were working on the game or running benchmark tools. They say that the errors even resulted in SSD and memory corruption, which is shocking because it is kind of a rare issue. The developers also highlighted that the crashes affected their game's servers, crashing them completely.
Several reports on reddit indicate that gamers are running into out of video driver memory (VRAM) error messages, even though their PCs had sufficient memory. Players have also been reported about the problems they faced in other games, either related to the CPU or the GPU.
Experts say Intel has a big problem
Wendell Wilson posted a video on Level1Techs' YouTube channel that explains why Intel's 13900k's and 14900k's are crashing frequently. The analysis of two different telemetry databases (crash reports from 2 Unreal engine games), showed that the majority of issues were related to the Intel 13900k and 14900k. Level1Tech said that data centers which had these CPUs saw a 50% failure rate in a seven-day period.
The analysis indicated that the CPUs degraded over time, and this resulted in more and more errors. This is something that Alderon Games had also mentioned, that these CPUs had a nearly 100% failure rate in their tests, and it was only a matter of time before the affected CPUs could fail. Another video published by Gamers Nexus featuring Steve Burke and Wendell, explains more about the problem. The findings suggest that the only way to fix the instability issues could be by replacing the CPUs.
On a similar note, the developers of the popular game, Warframe, have also revealed (via Tom's Hardware) that Intel's K-series chips, specifically the Core i9 and Core i7 CPUs, are the major culprits in nearly 80% of crashes.
Intel had previously confirmed that it was investigating the issues reported by users and outlets, and has published some guidance. The company noted, in a support document, that some motherboards (BIOS) had been allowing the processor to run "at turbo frequencies and voltages even while the processor is at a high temperature." Intel is advising users to run their PCs at their stock settings, i.e. without overclocking them.
The chipset maker released a new Microcode and BIOS update, which was to fix the eTVB (enhanced Thermal Velocity Boost). But this was not identified as the root cause of these instability issues, and Intel is still investigating the problems. Intel is working with mother partners to roll out the patch for the eTVB bug, as part of BIOS updates, the updates should be released on July 19th.
Alderon says that Intel's updates have not fixed the problems so far, and that the company has swapped its servers to AMD CPUs, which the company claims is experiencing far fewer crashes than on the Intel CPUs. The developers are also notifying users who have these processors about the issue, and how they can fix it.
What could Intel do, if this is a hardware defect? Recall the affected CPUs and offer replacements?
Are you using an Intel 13th or 14th gen CPU? Have you overclocked it? Have you run into similar problems with your PC? Share your experience with us.
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