Intel processors crashing Unreal engine games (and others)

[gdansk]

Best you will get is maybe being more generous with RMA. Intel typically only produces product for 3 years, and K is usually even shorter than that. They simply wouldn't have product that long to have an extended warranty period.

Especially when it seems that with AI hype, Intel feels necessary to bring out another gen (Bartlett Lake) rather than extending Raptor Lake for as long as needed.

Bartlett Lake provides an extended RMA solution. But Intel wants it so that if a first batch 13900K starts crashing in fall of 2025 they don't have to do anything. Even though it was due to firmware bug - present since 2022 - known to cause permanent, irreversible damage.

 

[inquiss]

Intel. Though they admitted they are still in the process of confirming that.

Yeah, I wouldn't trust that. Don't think we should take the official word that they think they are ok now to mean much considering how slow they have walked this information. That's the same situation as desktop a little while ago

 

[gdansk]

My car had unusually high failure rate for the transmission. The manufacturer issued a recall and replaced it even though my car was out of warranty.

If people aren't impacted by or are not concerned by the problem (they exist) they'll ignore the recall. For everyone else it should be that simple. Am I wrong?

 

[maddie]

Intel. Though they admitted they are still in the process of confirming that.

Kind of an oxymoron.

 

[igor_kavinski]

My car had unusually high failure rate for the transmission. The manufacturer issued a recall and replaced it even though my car was out of warranty.

If people aren't impacted by or are not concerned by the problem (they exist) they'll ignore the recall. For everyone else it should be that simple. Am I wrong?

Umm...the car market is pretty saturated. Your car maker, if a small one, probably can't afford ANY bad publicity so they HAD to do the recall out of an abundance of caution and maybe regulatory reasons too.

No one regulates Intel. Not even the government!

 

[KompuKare]

PCGH have a survey in their news item:

Instabile Intel-CPUs: Kein Rückruf, kein Fix für defekte CPUs [Update]

Wie Intel jetzt bekannt gegeben hat, wird es keine Lösung in Form eines Fixes für instabile Core-CPUs der 13. und 14. Generation geben.

www.pcgameshardware.de

ATM they have a little over 17% saying their Core-CPU has been affected:

Now somewhat self-selecting but not random since you would have to be registered/signed-in.

Now PCGH started out as magazine and have been around for ages (I remember buying their mag while visiting Germany probably close to twenty years ago), so they may have a large audience.

What I found strange is that prior to a few weeks ago nobody was talking about it yet now we get 17%. Also glancing at the comments there are people who have done RMAs so unlikely to have been that recent.

My question is: prior to this did nobody who experience anything not talk about it, somehow blamed themselves, or what?

 

[burninatortech4]

PCGH have a survey in their news item:

Instabile Intel-CPUs: Kein Rückruf, kein Fix für defekte CPUs [Update]

Wie Intel jetzt bekannt gegeben hat, wird es keine Lösung in Form eines Fixes für instabile Core-CPUs der 13. und 14. Generation geben.

www.pcgameshardware.de

ATM they have a little over 17% saying their Core-CPU has been affected:

Now somewhat self-selecting but not random since you would have to be registered/signed-in.

Now PCGH started out as magazine and have been around for ages (I remember buying their mag while visiting Germany probably close to twenty years ago), so they may have a large audience.

What I found strange is that prior to a few weeks ago nobody was talking about it yet now we get 17%. Also glancing at the comments there are people who have done RMAs so unlikely to have been that recent.

My question is: prior to this did nobody who experience anything not talk about it, somehow blamed themselves, or what?

My cousin (a self-employed graphic designer) has a 13700K that has been crashing for months. By and large, he has been blaming himself for this.

He is not tech literate but has enough knowledge to know something is wrong and has lost productivity at work trying to figure out his issue. Since this story broke I walked him through disabling the automatic overclocking features on his ASUS ProArt mobo and installing the recent BIOS update. This has helped somewhat but I suspect he will need to RMA before too long.

I feel super bad about it because this experience has made him afraid of tinkering with his computer ("I might break something!") which is a huge shame. He has always prefered intel chips and this experience has completely soured his relationship with Intel.

 

[Kepler_L2]

My question is: prior to this did nobody who experience anything not talk about it, somehow blamed themselves, or what?

I have seen a few streamers on Twitch (with 13900k/14900K systems) having crashes and assuming it was an issue with the game, Windows or NVIDIA drivers.

 

[KompuKare]

I have seen a few streamers on Twitch (with 13900k/14900K systems) having crashes and assuming it was an issue with the game, Windows or NVIDIA drivers.

Intel helping Microsoft finally get its revenge on all the Windows Vista crashes cause by Nvidia drivers then!

 

[jpiniero]

Bartlett Lake provides an extended RMA solution. But Intel wants it so that if a first batch 13900K starts crashing in fall of 2025 they don't have to do anything.

I imagine the patch will be more aggressive than normal on suppressing voltage (and if need be clocks) to stop the crashing.

 

[lakedude]

My question is: prior to this did nobody who experience anything not talk about it, somehow blamed themselves, or what?

Decades of solid CPUs from both Intel and AMD have troubleshooters assuming that it is never the CPU.

I can only recall 2 bad CPUs out of thousands I've been responsible for, one from Cyrix and the other an AMD that burned up when the heatsink fell off in shipping. Pretty sure I've never seen a bad Intel CPU.

RAM, MB, PS and software are historically more likely to have issues so more likely to catch the blame.

I would have been tempted to blame the Unreal Engine or even the video card but never an Intel CPU.

This is a huge problem for Intel because now they are going to catch the blame for more than their fair share of problems. They have trashed their reputation like Boeing and Crowdstrike, idiots!

 

[Markfw]

Decades of solid CPUs from both Intel and AMD have troubleshooters assuming that it is never the CPU.

I can only recall 2 bad CPUs out of thousands I've been responsible for, one from Cyrix and the other an AMD that burned up when the heatsink fell off in shipping. Pretty sure I've never seen a bad Intel CPU.

RAM, MB, PS and software are historically more likely to have issues so more likely to catch the blame.

I would have been tempted to blame the Unreal Engine or even the video card but never an Intel CPU.

This is a huge problem for Intel because now they are going to catch the blame for more than their fair share of problems. They have trashed their reputation like Boeing and Crowdstrike, idiots!

More than their fair share of problems ? NO. Intel and their aggressive factory overclocking to win benchmarks is what did this. How many people does it take to convince you ? Are you in complete denial ?

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

Intel and their aggressive factory overclocking to win benchmarks is what did this.

My first thoughts about this whole problem way back when

 

[lakedude]

More than their fair share of problems ? NO. Intel and their aggressive factory overclocking to win benchmarks is what did this. How many people does it take to convince you ? Are you in complete denial ?

Not sure where this is coming from. I spent hours reading and catching up, wanting to relive the big root cause reveal from the POV of this thread.

I completely understand that Intel shot themselves in the foot on the 13th and 14th gen.

Not sure what could have given you any other impression.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

RAM, MB, PS and software are historically more likely to have issues so more likely to catch the blame.

I would have been tempted to blame the Unreal Engine or even the video card but never an Intel CPU.

That's why it took so long for this to blow up. It would show up as an Nvidia driver or out of vram issue. As storage issues; it had people replacing their nvme and getting frustrated the problem was still there. It had people getting EAC banned for cheating in Fortnite. Spending hours stress testing to no avail. WHEA errors, CTD, etc.

EVERYTHING but a bad CPU, because as you noted, faulty CPUs are as rare as hen's teeth.

@dmens

Gratitude for sharing both your time and extensive knowledge of Intel. Stop in when you can; I think I speak for most of us when I say your content is must read.

 

[Nothingness]

Are they really? There's nothing they can do. It's not their fault. This is purely a management mistake. They told the engineers what to do. The engineers must've voiced their concerns (as one of MLID's sources said that the ring bus thingy was a major concern even with Alder Lake). Management was like, "F U, peasants! You do what we tell you. Now crank this thing up to 11 and don't you dare speak up again!". If this happened to me, I would remain perfectly calm and unconcerned when things go bad. Whatever management says to me at that point, my simple answer would be, "We had this conversation before. I told you this and this and this. My advice was ignored. I did my job to the best of my ability. Don't ask me to clean up the mess that I was not willing to create in the first place."

This is actually what I told MY management when they didn't like the performance improvement of our core application in Azure Cloud. I did the necessary benchmarking and told them before going live that they were spending way too much for relatively paltry gains. They ignored me. If I hadn't done my job, I would be out on the streets right now because the easiest thing for them would be to lay all the blame on me. Now they can't coz I have evidence and they won't dare touch my hornet's nest

When you have worked hard on a design and management tells you to skip some steps and you warned them, it’s not a matter of childishly tell them ‘I warned you, I was right, it’s your fault’. The thing is that your design on which you worked for years and for which you gave the best is seen as a piece of useless buggy silicon. If you don’t find that extremely frustrating, you should consider becoming a manager.

 

[lakedude]

I've got a buddy that recently spent a small fortune on an i9-14900HX, RTX 4080 laptop.

Should I clue him in? Or just hope he is not affected?

 

[maddie]

I've got a buddy that recently spent a small fortune on an i9-14900HX, RTX 4080 laptop.

Should I clue him in? Or just hope he is not affected?

Unless he has problems, ignorance is bliss until certain. On the other hand, I always want to know the situation.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

I've got a buddy that recently spent a small fortune on an i9-14900HX, RTX 4080 laptop.

Should I clue him in? Or just hope he is not affected?

Of course I'd inform him, so he can make an informed decision. They will also have the knowledge of how failing raptor lake manifest, for future reference. Hell, even if it is someone I'd like to spin kick in the liver I'd tell them. I'm cool like that.

 

[coercitiv]

I've got a buddy that recently spent a small fortune on an i9-14900HX, RTX 4080 laptop.

Should I clue him in? Or just hope he is not affected?

Intel says laptop chips are not affected. It's hard to believe them, but we also lack the data to dispute this (people who investigated focused on desktops because the data was less noisy).

Here's a simple deciding factor, your buddy's warranty on that machine:

• 1 year warranty - tell him now, he should lower clocks for now
• 2-3 year warranty - wait until mid August, see what Intel confesses in the meantime

If Intel denies laptop chips are also affected and his machine becomes unstable right after warranty expires, it's checkmate for him.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Here's where I am on anything Intel says -

"Intel Core Truths"

Matt from Alderon games says they have HX laptops failing, that's good enough for me.

 

[Markfw]

If I were him, I would just return it, not to take the chance, and get a series 8000 AMD laptop with a 4080.

I don't like taking changes, he should be able to return it NOW with no penalty.

edit: see above comment: "Matt from Alderon games says they have HX laptops failing, that's good enough for me." by DApunisher.

 

[jpiniero]

Intel says laptop chips are not affected. It's hard to believe them, but we also lack the data to dispute this (people who investigated focused on desktops because the data was less noisy).

Limiting clocks wouldn't help since it's voltage and not clocks is what matters.

 

[igor_kavinski]

If you don’t find that extremely frustrating, you should consider becoming a manager.

The "pride in my work" part of me died when my company made millions a year from my CGI "C/C++" executable based company intranet that ran only on a measly Core 2 Duo 3.2 GHz and the performance was pretty good. On top of that, I could make changes on the fly and suddenly some bug would get fixed or additional functionality added with just a page refresh. I received absolutely zero appreciation for that hard work. Now the same work is done by a "professional" dotnet so-fat-it's-disgusting application that is buggy as heck, gets stuck for minutes at a time because the dumb developer locks some tables to maintain data integrity but writes so much data and verifies so many different things that no matter if it all ran on a 6 GHz Zen 5 server CPU with 256 threads, it would still get bottlenecked and unresponsive due to the inherent design flaws. My management asks me about these things and I always tell them, what do you expect from a Dotnet Webforms application, a technology released almost 20 years ago? They always nod their head in dismay and I get a few more months to enjoy my apathy before they pose the same question to me, again and again. I'm not alone in being like that. Anyone who's stuck in a thankless job and having to report to management with absolute gorilla level IQ and mentality, wouldn't be too different from me in approaching such things.

 

[coercitiv]

Limiting clocks wouldn't help since it's voltage and not clocks is what matters.

v/f curve, VIDs... the CPU will request lower voltages when forced to clock lower.