Intel has now confirmed that the company is currently investigating reports from gamers in the r/buildapc and r/intel subreddits, as well as in a collection thread on Steam, that indicate that 13th and 14th generation Core CPUs may fail in certain situations and under certain workloads are more prone to stability problems. The two processor generations Raptor Lake and Raptor Lake Refresh are said to be affected.
Reports of Core CPUs with K suffix are being investigated
In the posts on Reddit and Steam, only core processors from the latest CPU architecture Raptor Lake-S, which also serves as the basis for the current Raptor Lake Refresh, were mentioned when it came to the aforementioned stability problems in games. The following models are said to be potentially affected:
Intel Core i9-14900KIntel Core i9-14900KFIntel Core i7-14700KIntel Core i7-14700KFIntel Core i9-13900KSIntel Core i9-13900KIntel Core i9-13900KFIntel Core i7-13700KIntel Core i7-13700KF
Intel confirmed corresponding reports to the Tom's Hardware website and announced that the company is already working with its partners on a corresponding analysis of players' problem reports.
Intel is aware of reports of potential issues with 13th and 14th Core generation desktop processors occurring under certain workloads. We work with our partners and conduct an appropriate analysis of the reported issues.
– versus Intel Tom’s Hardware –
What is striking is that the affected players generally describe roughly the same problems. The instability does not occur immediately after switching to a core CPU with a K suffix from the 13th and 14th generations, but only after a certain amount of time. It was quickly speculated that the core CPUs could not tolerate the high clock frequency and would “age” quickly.
The investigation into the causes has now begun
So far we can only speculate about the cause(s) for the instability of the core CPUs with the K suffix. Many players report that the problems mainly occur in games based on Unreal Engine 5, which is known for its particularly high load peaks. The BIOS and its firmware, the very high clock frequencies and driver problems also come into consideration. Until Intel has completed its investigations, speculation remains.
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Those: Steam, Reddit, Intel via Tom’s Hardware