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For several months, Intel has been investigating reports that high-end 13th and 14th Gen desktop processors (mainly, but not exclusively, Core i9-13900K and 14900K) were crashing in games. Intel has partially addressed the factor by insisting that third-party motherboard brands follow Intel’s recommended default strength settings on their motherboards, but the company said it’s still working to identify the root cause of the problem.
The company announced that it had completed its investigation and that a microcode update to address the issue is expected to be sent to motherboard brands in mid-August “after full validation. ” Microcode updates like this often require a BIOS update, so exactly when the patch arrives on your fast motherboard will depend on the company that created it.
Intel says an investigation of the faulty processors “confirms that the maximum operating voltage comes from a set of microcode rules that result in voltage requests to the processor. “In other words, the processor receives too much power, which degrades stability over time.
If you have a 13th or 14th generation processor and don’t have any issues, updating the microcode is worth it to prevent your processor from degrading. But if you’re already experiencing stability issues, Tom’s Hardware reports that “the bug causes irreversible degradation of affected processors” and that the patch won’t be able to fix the damage that’s already been done.
There is no mention of the 12th generation processors, adding the Core i9-12900K, suffering from the same problems. The 12th generation processors use Intel’s Alder Lake architecture, while the higher-end 13th and 14th generation chips use a modified architecture called Raptor Lake that includes higher clock speeds, more memory cache and additional E cores.
Tom’s Hardware also claims that Intel will continue to update the troubled processors and that updating the microcode will not materially affect the processor’s performance.
Intel also hypothesized that there was a rust-like production factor in some of the early 13th Gen Core processors, but that the issues would have been resolved by 2023 and were not similar to crashes and instability fixed by the update. of the microcode.
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