Intel is now investigating reports of its high-end 13th generation and 14th generation processors experiencing crashing issues while gaming, according to a new report.
This comes from Wccftechwith the article’s writer noting that they have encountered stability issues with a Core i9-13900K CPU in a new gaming PC built when the RTX 4090 first came out.
Over the past few months, there have been widespread reports of such shakiness, general instability, and crashes from PC gamers owning current or latest generation Core i9 chips (Raptor Lake and Raptor Lake Refresh). This also applies to Epic Games to observe that there could be a ‘hardware issue’ with 13900K and 14900K CPUs that leads to more crashes, especially in games that use the Unreal Engine.
As Wccftech notes, one of the commonly reported problems with these processors is a strange “Insufficient Video Memory” error which, despite what it claims, is not a problem with video RAM, but with the CPU.
And now Wccftech is highlighting the fact that gamers in South Korea are returning PCs or swapping out affected Intel chips with AMD Ryzen processors. We’re told there are at least ten such returns happening every day in the country, using 13th or 14th generation CPUs (or PCs with these chips in them), which is a rather surprising figure.
Apparently a lot more of these ‘video memory’ errors are being encountered now, thanks to a Tekken 8 demo released via Steam that appears to be particularly crash-prone.
The news that all of this has reached Team Blue’s attention and that Intel is now investigating these stability issues comes courtesy of ZDNet Korea.
Analysis: A thorny problem indeed
Whatever’s going on here, let’s hope Intel expands this to a broader investigation (globally – because reports of affected silicon certainly extend to a global stage), and we hear more about this issue soon enough. There are enough reports and complaints in consumer reviews that this should be a concern, even though these are nothing more than claims at this stage – and we won’t know for sure what’s going on until a full and complete investigation has been conducted .
There are many factors to consider that make this particularly tricky. Are some 13900K or 14900K processors actually defective? Well, that’s possible – with any product there can be manufacturing defects and component failures – but this apparently happens more than could reasonably be expected with these CPUs.
However, there can be many other hardware or software issues that also cause stability issues.
Motherboard settings can play a role here, for example, and there’s some advice to reduce reported crashes in games, including undervolting your CPU (as Wccftech suggests – in other words, lowering the clock speed). Or adjusting the motherboard’s default current limits, or even the current limits (according to this Reddit thread).
Others suggest that pushing these high-end CPUs, which are already power-driven to hit their stock clock speeds, combined with poor cooling (like a stock cooler) and perhaps clunky motherboard settings on top of that, could be to blame. . So a combination of factors.
When it comes to troubleshooting any stability issues, the problem is that if you don’t have a lot of confidence in adjusting the motherboard settings in the BIOS, this type of troubleshooting will be a very intimidating process.
Meanwhile, there are suggestions from various reports that some of these 13900K and 14900K chips are experiencing degradation, to the point where the CPU eventually becomes so bad that Windows won’t even boot.
In short, we need to hear from Intel, and some firmer details about where the problem – or problems – might lie with this reported misbehavior of current and last generation silicon.