Intel’s Core i9 CPUs have had some serious issues, but Intel insists it’s your motherboard’s fault
Intel has been in hot water lately, with numerous reports about 13th and 14th generation i9 processors crashes while playing games and in some cases they refuse to boot Windows altogether. Now Intel has released an official statement about the fiasco, but it’s probably not what users want to hear.
The blame game has been in full swing in recent weeks PCGamer report that Epic Games has publicly sued Intel over the issues. In a new statement to the German tech news site Igor’s laboratoryIntel has now blamed motherboard manufacturers for failing to properly implement “thermal and power safeguards.” Intel says it’s the motherboard’s fault that the chip is overheating – a bold stance from the chipmaker.
Some attempts have been made to solve the problems Asus releases a BIOS patch for the motherboardbut the problems are far from over. Gigabyte’s solution caused CPU performance to take a hitwhich angered some users who had already invested in a new high-end Core i9 CPU.
Will a solution arrive?
The affected chips span two CPU generations, but both are built on the same chip microarchitecture: Intel’s 13th and 14th generation i9 processors use the Raptor Lake and Raptor Lake Refresh architectures respectively, hence both are affected. As far as we know the problem is desktop chip related, so don’t panic if you just bought a shiny new gaming laptop with an i9-14900HX.
Intel admitted in its statement that while it “continues to actively investigate this issue,” it has not identified the cause of the problem. The crashes appear to be related to power and thermal issues; Basically, the chip draws too much current, overheats and shuts down to prevent damage. Intel also provided a short list of other things that can cause system instability, including their use Windows Ultimate Performance Mode and disabling the processor’s C states, as well as overclocking in general – all things PC gamers could do to improve in-game performance, which is annoying.
As for what Intel advises users to do, well… there’s not much to say. The statement appears to be aimed more at motherboard manufacturers than consumers, saying that “Intel strongly recommends that the customer’s default BIOS settings should ensure operation remains within Intel’s recommended settings.” In other words, not our problem.
Intel’s i9 chips are power-hungry beasts the i9-13900K achieved a staggering peak power of 337W in our test testsand Intel has even introduced a new ‘Extreme Power Delivery’ profile for its 13th-generation CPUs, so it’s perhaps not surprising that the chips suffer from thermal safety issues.
It’s a bit disheartening to see Intel refusing to take responsibility for this problem, especially since these i9 desktop chips are quite expensive. However, the CPU giant has said that it also plans to release another statement with more information in May, so that could change. And these problematic chips certainly aren’t literally melting people’s components.