About a month ago, we started hearing reports of Intel CPUs crashing during gaming, with claims that high-end 13th and 14th-gen parts were unstable. Nvidia responded by attributing the issue to Intel CPUs and recommended that users underclock their systems to avoid stability problems. Shortly thereafter, Intel claimed an investigation was underway. Subsequent to this, we received BIOS updates from Asus that included a new "Intel Baseline Profile," and Gigabyte has also rolled out their updates since then.
It's important to note that not all 13th and 14th-gen K-SKU processors are experiencing instability issues, and we're not entirely sure how widespread the problem is, though user reports online are numerous.
It appears that silicon degradation is a concern, with CPUs being aggressively overclocked by default, leading to rapid degradation that prevents them from maintaining stability with the default settings. This is our speculation, and of course, Intel isn't likely to disclose the full story, but all available data suggests something along these lines is occurring.
Intel CPUs Are Crashing and It's Intel's Fault
Intel's crashing CPU crisis deepens as more models are affected than originally thought
The first disappointment is that the patch won't fix the processors if they are already crashing. Intel has advised owners to use Intel Default Settings in their motherboard BIOS while waiting for the microcode update, although this is not a guaranteed fix. But it appears the best course of action for customers that have already experienced damage is to simply replace the processor instead of tweaking BIOS settings. Intel would not share estimates with reporters of how many chips are likely to be irreversibly impacted.Worse, it now appears that the crashing issue is also affecting all 65W and higher CPUs as well as the mainstream non-K models alongside their K/KF/KS variants
Game developer claims Intel is selling defective CPUs
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.
