I have a 13 series chip, it had some reproducible crashing issues that so far have subsided by downclocking it. It is in the window they’ve shared for the oxidation issue. At this point there’s no reliable way of knowing to what degree I’m affected, by what type of issue, whether I should wait for the upcoming patch or reach out to see if they’ll replace it.
I am not happy about it.
Obviously next time I’d go AMD, just on principle, but this isn’t the 90s anymore. I could do a drop-in replacement to another Intel chip, but switching platforms is a very expensive move these days. This isn’t just a bad CPU issue, this could lead to having to swap out two multi-hundred dollar componenet, at least on what should have been a solidly future-proof setup for at least five or six years.
I have a 13 series chip, it had some reproducible crashing issues that so far have subsided by downclocking it.
From the article:
the company confirmed a patch is coming in mid-August that should address the “root cause” of exposure to elevated voltage. But if your 13th or 14th Gen Intel Core processor is already crashing, that patch apparently won’t fix it.
Citing unnamed sources, Tom’s Hardware reports that any degradation of the processor is irreversible, and an Intel spokesperson did not deny that when we asked.
If your CPU is already crashing then that’s it, game over. The upcoming patch cannot fix it. You’ve got to figure out if you can do a warranty replacement or continue to live with workarounds like you’re doing now.
Their retail boxed CPUs usually have a 3(?) year warranty so for a 13th gen CPU you may be midway or at the tail end of that warranty period. If it’s OEM, etc. it could be a 1 year warranty aka Intel isn’t doing anything about it unless a class action suit forces them :/
The whole situation sucks and honestly seems a bit crazy that Intel hasn’t already issued a recall or dealt with this earlier.
If you’re in the UK or I expect EU, I imagine if it’s due to oxidation you can get it replaced even on an expired warranty as it’s a defect which was known to either you or intel before the warranty expired, and a manufacturing defect rather than breaking from use, so intel are pretty much in a corner about having sold you faulty shit
The article is… not wrong, but oversimplifying. There seem to be multiple faults at play here, some would continue to degrade, others would prevent you from recovering some performance threshold, but may be prevented from further damage, others may be solved. Yes, degradation of the chip may be irreversible, if it’s due to the oxidation problem or due to the incorrect voltages having cuased damage, but presumably in some cases the chip would continue to work stable and not degenerate further with the microcode fixes.
But yes, agreed, the situation sucks and Intel should be out there disclosing a range of affected chips by at least the confirmed physical defect and allowing a streamlined recall of affected devices, not saying “start an RMA process and we’ll look into it”.
Went 13th -> 14th very early in both’s launch cycles because of chronic crashing. After about swapping mobo, RAM and SSDs i finally swapped to AMD and my build from late 2022 is FINALLY stable. Wendell’s video was the catalyst to jump ship. I thought I was going crazy, but yea… it was intel
Whoa, that’s even worse. It’s not just the uncertainty of knowing whether Intel will replace your hardware or the cost of jumping ship next time. Intel straight up owes you money. That sucks.
Yea, my crashes were either watchdog BSODs, or nvldkkm (nvidia). So diagnosing the issue was super difficult, the CPU is the last thing I think of unless there’s some evidence of it failing :).
I also got to experience a cable mod adapter burn a 4090… Zotac replaced the card thank god. I’m a walking billboard of what went wrong in the last 2 years with components lol.
Anyhow I hope we all get a refund. My PC is my main hobby so having instability caused a ton of frustration and anguish.
switching platforms is a very expensive move these days.
It’s just a motherboard and a cpu. Everything else is cross compatible, likely even your cpu cooler. If you just buy another intel chip… it’s just gonna oxidize again.
Personally i’d wait for the next release to drop in a month… or until your system crashes aren’t bearable / it’s worth making the change. I just don’t see the cost as prohibitive, it’s about on par with all the alternatives. Plus you could sell your old motherboard for something.
I’m not really that knowledgeable about AM5 mobos (still on AM4) but you should be able to get something perfectly sensible for 100 bucks. Are you going to get as much IO and bells and whistles no but most people don’t need that stuff and you don’t have to spend a lot of money to get a good VRM or traces to the DIMM slots.
Then, possibly bad news: Intel Gen 13 supports DDR4, so you might need new RAM.
No, I have a DDR5 setup. Which is why my motherboard was way more expensive than 100 bucks.
The problem isn’t upgrading to a entry level AM5 motherboard, the problem is that to get back to where I am with my rather expensive Intel motherboard I have to spend a lot more than that. Moving to AMD doesn’t mean I want to downgrade.
I mean… back in the days I would never have bought a uATX board. You need expansion slots, after all, video, sound, TV, network, at least.
Nowadays? Exactly one PCIe slot occupied by the graphics card. Soundcards are pointless nowadays if your onboard doesn’t suffice for what you want to do you’d get an external audio interface, have it away from all that EM interference in the case, TV we’ve got the internet, NIC is onboard and as I won’t downgrade my network to wifi that’s not needed, either.
As far as I’m concerned pretty much all of my boards were an upgrade while also simultaneously becoming more and more budget.
32GB of ddr5 can be found for ~$100, and any other upgrade from a ddr4 platform today is going to require new memory.
So the DDR4 13th series folks can stay on their oxidized processors, or they can pay money to get something else. Not much else to do there.
I upgraded my AM4 platform system to a 5800x3d a while back and it’s still working just fine. I wouldn’t recommend people buying into AM4 today just because no more upgrades are coming… but AM5? why not? It’ll be around until ddr6 is affordable circa 2027.
I’m super interested in seeing how intel’s 15th gen turns out. We know it’s a new socket so the buy in cost is sky high as all have argued here (that mobo/cpu/ram is crazy expensive.) I can only imagine they will drop power load to avoid more issues but who can say. Maybe whatever design they are using won’t have been so aggressively tuned or if they’re lucky hasn’t started physical production so they can modify it appropriately. Time will tell, and we won’t know if it has the same issue for a year or so post release.
I mean, happy for you, but in the real world a 200 extra dollars for a 400 dollar part is a huge price spike.
Never mind that, be happy for me, I actually went for a higher spec than that when I got this PC because I figured I’d get at least one CPU upgrade out of this motherboard, since it was early days of DDR5 and it seemed like I’d be able to both buy faster RAM and a faster CPU to keep my device up to date. So yeah, it was more expensive than that.
And hey, caveat emptor, futureproofing is a risky, expensive game on PCs. I was ready for a new technology to make me upgrade anyway, if we suddenly figured out endless storage or instant RAM or whatever. Doesn’t mean it isn’t crappy to suddenly make upgrading my CPU almost twice as expensive because Intel sucks at their one job.
When did you buy it? Depending on the credit card you have, they will sometimes extend on any manufacturer warranty by a year or two. Might be worth checking.
Nope, pretty much none in most cases. Though this is probably going to devolve into a giant class-action, because it is pretty egregious… so affected people will get something like $6.71 and the lawyers will walk away with a couple billion or whatever.
I have a 13 series chip, it had some reproducible crashing issues that so far have subsided by downclocking it. It is in the window they’ve shared for the oxidation issue. At this point there’s no reliable way of knowing to what degree I’m affected, by what type of issue, whether I should wait for the upcoming patch or reach out to see if they’ll replace it.
I am not happy about it.
Obviously next time I’d go AMD, just on principle, but this isn’t the 90s anymore. I could do a drop-in replacement to another Intel chip, but switching platforms is a very expensive move these days. This isn’t just a bad CPU issue, this could lead to having to swap out two multi-hundred dollar componenet, at least on what should have been a solidly future-proof setup for at least five or six years.
I am VERY not happy about it.
From the article:
If your CPU is already crashing then that’s it, game over. The upcoming patch cannot fix it. You’ve got to figure out if you can do a warranty replacement or continue to live with workarounds like you’re doing now.
Their retail boxed CPUs usually have a 3(?) year warranty so for a 13th gen CPU you may be midway or at the tail end of that warranty period. If it’s OEM, etc. it could be a 1 year warranty aka Intel isn’t doing anything about it unless a class action suit forces them :/
The whole situation sucks and honestly seems a bit crazy that Intel hasn’t already issued a recall or dealt with this earlier.
If you’re in the UK or I expect EU, I imagine if it’s due to oxidation you can get it replaced even on an expired warranty as it’s a defect which was known to either you or intel before the warranty expired, and a manufacturing defect rather than breaking from use, so intel are pretty much in a corner about having sold you faulty shit
The article is… not wrong, but oversimplifying. There seem to be multiple faults at play here, some would continue to degrade, others would prevent you from recovering some performance threshold, but may be prevented from further damage, others may be solved. Yes, degradation of the chip may be irreversible, if it’s due to the oxidation problem or due to the incorrect voltages having cuased damage, but presumably in some cases the chip would continue to work stable and not degenerate further with the microcode fixes.
But yes, agreed, the situation sucks and Intel should be out there disclosing a range of affected chips by at least the confirmed physical defect and allowing a streamlined recall of affected devices, not saying “start an RMA process and we’ll look into it”.
Went 13th -> 14th very early in both’s launch cycles because of chronic crashing. After about swapping mobo, RAM and SSDs i finally swapped to AMD and my build from late 2022 is FINALLY stable. Wendell’s video was the catalyst to jump ship. I thought I was going crazy, but yea… it was intel
Whoa, that’s even worse. It’s not just the uncertainty of knowing whether Intel will replace your hardware or the cost of jumping ship next time. Intel straight up owes you money. That sucks.
Yea, my crashes were either watchdog BSODs, or nvldkkm (nvidia). So diagnosing the issue was super difficult, the CPU is the last thing I think of unless there’s some evidence of it failing :).
I also got to experience a cable mod adapter burn a 4090… Zotac replaced the card thank god. I’m a walking billboard of what went wrong in the last 2 years with components lol.
Anyhow I hope we all get a refund. My PC is my main hobby so having instability caused a ton of frustration and anguish.
It’s just a motherboard and a cpu. Everything else is cross compatible, likely even your cpu cooler. If you just buy another intel chip… it’s just gonna oxidize again.
$370 for a 7800x3d https://www.microcenter.com/product/674503/amd-ryzen-7-7800x3d-raphael-am5-42ghz-8-core-boxed-processor-heatsink-not-included
~$200 for a motherboard.
Personally i’d wait for the next release to drop in a month… or until your system crashes aren’t bearable / it’s worth making the change. I just don’t see the cost as prohibitive, it’s about on par with all the alternatives. Plus you could sell your old motherboard for something.
It’s just nearly $600. Practically free.
How much does it cost to fix a 14900k?
I’m not really that knowledgeable about AM5 mobos (still on AM4) but you should be able to get something perfectly sensible for 100 bucks. Are you going to get as much IO and bells and whistles no but most people don’t need that stuff and you don’t have to spend a lot of money to get a good VRM or traces to the DIMM slots.
Then, possibly bad news: Intel Gen 13 supports DDR4, so you might need new RAM.
No, I have a DDR5 setup. Which is why my motherboard was way more expensive than 100 bucks.
The problem isn’t upgrading to a entry level AM5 motherboard, the problem is that to get back to where I am with my rather expensive Intel motherboard I have to spend a lot more than that. Moving to AMD doesn’t mean I want to downgrade.
I mean… back in the days I would never have bought a uATX board. You need expansion slots, after all, video, sound, TV, network, at least.
Nowadays? Exactly one PCIe slot occupied by the graphics card. Soundcards are pointless nowadays if your onboard doesn’t suffice for what you want to do you’d get an external audio interface, have it away from all that EM interference in the case, TV we’ve got the internet, NIC is onboard and as I won’t downgrade my network to wifi that’s not needed, either.
As far as I’m concerned pretty much all of my boards were an upgrade while also simultaneously becoming more and more budget.
32GB of ddr5 can be found for ~$100, and any other upgrade from a ddr4 platform today is going to require new memory.
So the DDR4 13th series folks can stay on their oxidized processors, or they can pay money to get something else. Not much else to do there.
I upgraded my AM4 platform system to a 5800x3d a while back and it’s still working just fine. I wouldn’t recommend people buying into AM4 today just because no more upgrades are coming… but AM5? why not? It’ll be around until ddr6 is affordable circa 2027.
I’m super interested in seeing how intel’s 15th gen turns out. We know it’s a new socket so the buy in cost is sky high as all have argued here (that mobo/cpu/ram is crazy expensive.) I can only imagine they will drop power load to avoid more issues but who can say. Maybe whatever design they are using won’t have been so aggressively tuned or if they’re lucky hasn’t started physical production so they can modify it appropriately. Time will tell, and we won’t know if it has the same issue for a year or so post release.
I mean, happy for you, but in the real world a 200 extra dollars for a 400 dollar part is a huge price spike.
Never mind that, be happy for me, I actually went for a higher spec than that when I got this PC because I figured I’d get at least one CPU upgrade out of this motherboard, since it was early days of DDR5 and it seemed like I’d be able to both buy faster RAM and a faster CPU to keep my device up to date. So yeah, it was more expensive than that.
And hey, caveat emptor, futureproofing is a risky, expensive game on PCs. I was ready for a new technology to make me upgrade anyway, if we suddenly figured out endless storage or instant RAM or whatever. Doesn’t mean it isn’t crappy to suddenly make upgrading my CPU almost twice as expensive because Intel sucks at their one job.
When did you buy it? Depending on the credit card you have, they will sometimes extend on any manufacturer warranty by a year or two. Might be worth checking.
Are there like no consumer guarantees in the US? How is this not a open and shut case where the manufacturer needs to replace or refund the product?
Nope, pretty much none in most cases. Though this is probably going to devolve into a giant class-action, because it is pretty egregious… so affected people will get something like $6.71 and the lawyers will walk away with a couple billion or whatever.
Neat 👍 that sucks