Intel 13th/14th Gen CPUs have a ~100% Failure Rate? Decay Gradually & Start Crashing
We’ve extensively covered Intel’s faulty 13th and 14th Gen K-series processors. While these stability issues are primarily related to the Core i9–13900K, 14900K, 13900KF, 14900KF, 13900KS, and 14900KS, the rest of the K (and even non-K) SKUs may be affected as well. Following our reports on the failure of the “RMA of the RMA, “multiple game developers have reported on the instability of the 13th Gen Raptor Lake and 14th Gen Raptor Lake Refresh desktop processors. There’s much to unpack, and we’ll try to cover the most glaring testimonies.
Over the last 3–4 months, we have observed that CPUs initially working well deteriorate over time, eventually failing. The failure rate we have observed from our own testing is nearly 100%, indicating it’s only a matter of time before affected CPUs fail. This issue is gaining attention from news outlets and has been noted by Fortnite and RAD Game Tools, which powers decompression behind Unreal Engine.
Users are also receiving misleading error messages about running out of video driver memory, despite having sufficient memory.
Alderon Games
Alderon Games
This studio claims that Intel is selling defective 13th and 14th Gen CPUs. The studio founder has written an open letter to gamers and critiques, explaining the “significant problems” his team has been having with Intel CPU instability. These issues, including crashes, instability, and memory corruption, are confined to the 13th and 14th generation processors. Despite all released microcode, BIOS, and firmware updates, the problem remains unresolved.
The team at Alderon Games has decided to swap all their game servers to AMD which according to them, experience 100 times fewer crashes compared to the previously equipped Intel chips. The studio has also advised anyone hosting their game servers or selling game servers to avoid purchasing or using 13th and 14th Gen Core processors.
Epic Games
The developer of the Unreal Engine and Fortnite has asked Intel users to change the SVID Behavior (Extreme/AI Tweaker) to “Intel Fail Safe” in the BIOS menu. This setting sets the CPU voltage to the chipmaker’s default settings, although, this can have the opposite impact at times. The First Descendant is a recent Unreal Engine title that crashes constantly on a lot of Intel 13900K/14900K systems.
RAD Game Tools
One of Epic’s partners has also admitted to the Oodle Data decompression crashes being related to Intel hardware. More specifically, the Core i9–13900K and 14900K are the likely culprits, with the 13700K, 14700K, and their non-K variants potentially affected as well. The software developer states that the crashes on Intel Raptor Lake CPUs are caused by a “combination of BIOS settings and the high clock rates and power usage.”
As far as we can tell, there is not any software bug in Oodle or Unreal that is causing this. Due to what seem to be overly optimistic BIOS settings, some small percentage of processors go out of their functional range of clock rate and power draw under high load, and execute instructions incorrectly.
This is being seen disproportionately in Oodle Data decompression because unlike most gameplay, simulation, audio or rendering code, decompression needs to perform extra integrity checks to handle accidentally or maliciously corrupted data, and is thus likely to spot inconsistencies very soon after they occur. These decode failures then typically result in an error message.
When starting an Unreal Engine-based game, the most common failure is of this type:
DecompressShader(): Could not decompress shader (GetShaderCompressionFormat=Oodle)
- SVID behavior: Their recommendation is to switch to the Intel Default power profile while setting the SVID behavior to “Auto” instead of “Intel Failsafe.”
- ASUS Multi-core enhancement and other “CPU Boost” features are also best left disabled.
- P-core multiplier: As a last-case resort, you can reduce the P-core multiplier by 10 or 20.
- The Core i9–13900K/KF has a P-core multiplier of 55x, 57x, and 58x. You can reduce these to 53x across the board and see if the CPU stabilizes. If not, then you’re probably looking at an RMA.
- Intel i9–14900K/13900K CPUs Unstable even with Baseline Power Profile: Crashes in Games Persist
Workstations Running Core i9–13900K/14900K
Interestingly, workstation providers are also reporting stability issues with the 13th and 14th Gen Core i9s. Some data center service providers are charging up to $1000 extra as maintenance charges for these CPUs (which wasn’t there last year). It turns out that the support incidents for these SKUs are particularly high, and the solutions employed include updating the BIOS, disabling E-cores, or CPU replacement.
Some data center service providers are steering users towards the Ryzen 9 7950X, stating that it is more stable and faster in most cases. Credits to Level1Techs for the data.
