modern CPUs are usually pretty reliable so it came as a shock to people when
their shiny new Intel Core I9 processor started crashing for reasons unknown and
was even more shocking when they went online and found that there's been a
great deal of frustration about instability issues with Intel's 13th and
14th gen core I 9s along with some core i7s and even lower tier chips that has
gotten so bad that motherboard manufacturers were compelled to push out
BIOS updates to to help fix the problem but who's to blame for these issues is
Intel pushing out shoddy chips is another component manufacturer at fault
was it Colonel Mustard in the conservatory with the Candlestick well
the story is actually pretty complicated and has its roots in competition between
motherboard manufacturers however that doesn't mean that Intel shouldn't be
shouldering some of the blame as well let's go back though compared to a
couple of decades ago these days there isn't much to separate one motherboard
from another in terms of raw performance with manufacturers instead focusing more
on the feature set that a motherboard offers but that doesn't mean that the
motherboard companies aren't trying to convince people that their products are
faster than the other guys even if it's only by a few percentage points and this
is where the trouble begins you see Intel tells the motherboard companies
not to enable CPU overclocking out of the box users can of course overclock
their chips later if they want to but when you turn your PC on for the first
time you expect the things to be running at stock right well the motherboard
companies took no overclocking mostly to mean don't mess with the base clock and
the multiplier which are the main settings used to derive the clock speed
and they didn't mess with those but unfortunately they took liberties with
other settings specifically motherboard manufacturers were setting the load
lines incorrectly and if you don't know what load lines do they basically help
keep the CPU stable when it's dealing with a significant load doing this had
the intended effect of the CPU running cooler than it otherwise would have been
and when the system saw the CPU was cool
it would boost the CPU's speed which the mother manufacturers could possibly use
to say that their board was delivering better performance but the load line
configuration meant that they couldn't ensure stability at those boosted speeds
meanwhile the CPU cores would boost too much resulting in instability and the
load lines being out of whack meant that the CPU voltages would then over boost
which could damage the CPU permanently this was all compounded by some bioses
not lowering the clock speeds until the CPU temperature hit around 100° C which
is much warmer than the usual threshold
of course the motherboard companies were hoping the chips would be fine but
unfortunately reports of instability popped up from users running cinebench
Unreal Engine based and similar games and decompression software higher end
chips were hit harder as their high voltages speeds and temperatures caused
greater instability and even chip degradation in some cases resulting in
the need for an RMA to Intel investigations like the one undertaken
by the developers of the game Warframe showed that the problems were overwhelmingly on core i9s and some core
i7s now we did say that motherboard manufacturers tried to address these
issues unfortunately their initial fixes
didn't do much good or even made the situation worse and we'll tell you why
and how Intel themselves share the blame here right after we thank mend mend is
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news and people's CPUs broke BIOS updates started popping up that were
described as Intel baseline or Intel failsafe except this didn't actually
mean Intel's intended default settings for example Asus came out with a BIOS
that just jammed More Voltage through the chip to try to stabilize it even
though Intel Baseline would imply that it uses more conservative settings this
did help with stability for many users but it also had the unint side effect of
making their chips degrade faster and then once that happens you need even
more voltage to keep them stable and so on and so forth until the point of no
return but while motherboard companies stepped Over The Line in trying to
achieve performance advantages and in trying to fix this some of the blame
does lie with Intel for starters one
reason motherboard manufacturers felt that they were able to mess with the
overclock settings the way they did and why later BIOS fixes didn't completely
work is because Intel's guidance about prop voltages was actually quite vague
including for how long the load lines could be set Intel also identified a bug
in an Intel feature called ETB and
admitted that there was an issue with the CPUs themselves that resulted in
incorrect voltage requests to the processor that affected all 13th and
14th gen chips that were rated at 65 watts and higher and although they
didn't give any additional details it sounds like this may have been a
contributing factor to motherboards delivering too many volts to the CPU
course whoever owns Which percentage of the blame though the truth is Intel's
reputation has been tarnished to the point where one game developer has
announced they're migrating all of their servers to AMD CPUs and while it isn't
clear exactly why the ETB bug is present
it appears that toward the end of 2023 Intel was already trying to get
motherboard companies to rush out BIOS updates right around the time this
problem started to rear its ugly head which may have been the origin of the
ETB problem but take that with a grain of salt the good news at least is that
Intel has now released recommendations for the correct settings to be applied
to fix these instability problems and as of the time we wrote this the major
motherboard manufacturers have put these defaults into updated bioses as well as
a micro code patch for the ETV B bug for boards with 600 and 700 series chipsets
so please go download the latest BIOS for your motherboard as soon as possible
like right now even though Intel has said the fix for the root issue
contributing to excessive voltage isn't coming until the middle of August the
current BIOS updates should make your system more stable and at least prevent
damage to your CPU in the meantime if
for some reason you're still having stability issues and you don't have time
for system downtime to RMA your CPU to Intel you can try turning your CPU's
clock speed down by about 300 MHz by adjusting the multiplier in your BIOS
hopefully that'll at least keep you limping along in the meantime the one
positive that we hope comes out of all of this is Intel hopefully keeping a
closer eye on exactly how motherboard manufacturers build their products and
configure them before they leave the factory because it appears there's been
not enough oversight I understand it I mean with so many Boards out there it's
harder for Intel than say NVIDIA who has a more limited number of addin board
partner graphics cards to examine but team blue obviously is going to just
have to bite the bullet here no matter how many bunder boards are out there
because another hit to their reputation like this is not going to feel good by
the way there is another Wrinkle in all of this Intel has said that some reports
of instability can be traced back to Intel themselves to a manufacturing
error that involved oxidation of some early 13th gen chips so if you bought
your chip in early 2023 or prior that
could be part of your problem and seeing as it's a physical issue with the chip
that wouldn't be fixed with a micro code update so you will need to R Intel have
you had any problems with Intel's latest chips comment down below and if you want
to find out why electronics die in general go watch this video next