Magnify / Intel’s Core i9-13900K.Andrew Cunningham For a number of months, Intel has been investigating studies that its high-end Thirteenth- and 14th-generation desktop CPUs (in particular, however now not solely, the Core i9-13900K and 14900K) have been crashing right through gaming. . Intel partly answered to the problem by way of insisting that third-party motherboard producers apply Intel’s updates to their motherboards, however the corporate stated it’s nonetheless running to decide the reason for the issue. The corporate introduced the day past that it has finished its investigation and that microcode adjustments to mend the issue will have to be despatched to motherboard producers by way of August “after complete validation.” Microcode updates like this most often require a BIOS replace, so precisely when the patch arrives for your motherboard shall be from the corporate that made it. Intel says that the research of inaccurate processors “confirms that the excessive voltages are from the microcode set of rules that reasons the processor to be inaccurate.” In different phrases, the CPU is receiving an excessive amount of energy, which impacts balance through the years. In case you are the usage of a Thirteenth or 14th era CPU and you are now not seeing any problems, a microcode replace will have to offer protection to your processor from harm. However if you are already seeing balance problems, Tom’s {Hardware} says that “this monster reasons irreversible harm to affected processors” and that upkeep can’t opposite the wear that has already been performed. There’s no point out of Twelfth era processors, together with the Core i9-12900K, affected by the similar problems. The Twelfth-gen processors use Intel’s Alder Lake structure, whilst the Thirteenth- and 14th-gen chips use a so-called Raptor Lake structure that includes upper clock speeds, much less cache reminiscence, and extra E-cores. . Tom’s {Hardware} additionally says that Intel will proceed to replace CPUs which can be appearing problems and that microcode adjustments will have to now not impact CPU efficiency. Intel additionally showed one at a time that there used to be an oxidation downside with the Thirteenth era Core processors however that the issues have been mounted in 2023 and weren’t associated with the wear and instability that the microcode alternate is making plans.