Intel is about to have a lot of lawsuits on their hands if this delay deny deflect strategy doesn’t work out for them. This problem has been going on for over a year and the details Intel lets slip just keep getting worse and worse. The more customers that realize they’re getting defective CPUs, the more outcry there’ll be for a recall. Intel is going to be in a lot of trouble if they wait until regulators force them to have a recall.
Big moment of truth is next month when they have earnings and we see what the performance impact from dropping voltages will be. Hopefully it’ll just be 5% and no more CPUs die. I can’t imagine investors will be happy about the cost, though.
I want to say gamers rise up, but honestly gamers calling their member of Congress every day and asking what they’re doing about this fraud would be way more effective. Congress is in a Big Tech regulating mood right now
And this is why I never purchase a product with a revision code of *.0, and almost always purchase used.
Lol I dare you to buy these used now.
I’ll trade you for a S Florida car even-even
I’ll make a keychain out of them.
People are freaking out about the lack of a recall but intel says their patch that will supposedly stop currently working cpus from experiencing the overvolt condition that is leading to the failure. So they don’t really need to do a recall if currently working CPUs will stay working with the patch in place. As long as they offer some sort of free extended warranty and a good RMA proccess for the CPUs that are already damaged I feel it’s fine.
If they RMA with a bump in perf for those affected it might even be positive PR like “they stand by their products” but if they’re stingy with responsibility then we should obviously give them hell. We really have to see how they handle this.
They cant even commit to offering RMAs, period. They keep using vague, cant-be-used-against-me-in-a-court-of-law language.
That will surely earn trust with the public and result in brand loyalty, right???
If you give a chip more voltage, its transistors will switch faster, but they’ll degrade faster. Ideally, you want just barely enough voltage that everything’s reliably finished switching and all signals have propagated before it’s time for the next clock cycle, as that makes everything work and last as long as possible. When the degradation happens, at first it means things need more voltage to reach the same speed, and then they totally stop working. A little degradation over time is normal, but it’s not unreasonable to hope that it’ll take ten or twenty years to build up enough that a chip stops working at its default voltage.
The microcode bug they’ve identified and are fixing applies too much voltage to part of the chip under specific circumstances, so if an individual chip hasn’t experienced those circumstances very often, it could well have built up some degradation, but not enough that it’s stopped working reliably yet. That could range from having burned through a couple of days of lifetime, which won’t get noticed, to having a chip that’s in the condition you’d expect it to be in if it was twenty years old, which still could pass tests, but might keel over and die at any moment.
If they’re not doing a mass recall, and can’t come up with a test that says how affected an individual CPU has been without needing to be so damaged that it’s no longer reliable, then they’re betting that most people’s chips aren’t damaged enough to die until the after warranty expires. There’s still a big difference between the three years of their warranty and the ten to twenty years that people expect a CPU to function for, and customers whose parts die after thirty-seven months will lose out compared to what they thought they were buying.
Oh you mean they’re going to underclock the expensive new shit I bought and have it underperform to fix their fuck up?
What an unacceptable solution.
They aren’t over clocking / under clocking anything with the fix. The chip was just straight up requesting more voltage than it actually needed, this didn’t give any benefit and was probably an issue even without the damage it causes, due to extra heat generated.
Giving a CPU more voltage is just what overclocking is. Considering that most of these modern CPUs from both AMD and Intel have already been designed to start clocking until it reaches a high enough temp to start thermally throttling, it’s likely that there was a misstep in setting this threshold and the CPU doesn’t know when to quit until it kills itself. In the process it is undoubtedly gaining more performance than it otherwise would, but probably not by much, considering a lot of the high end CPUs already have really high thresholds, some even at 90 or 100 C.
If you actually knew anything you’d know that overclockers tend to manually reduce the voltage as they increase the clock speeds to improve stability, this only works up to a point, but clearly shows voltage does not directly influence clock speed.
Ah, got me with a reverse gish gallop. Now I’m an idiot, oh no…
That’s where the lawsuits will start flying. I wouldn’t be surprised if they knock off 5-15% of performance. That’s enough to put it well below comparable AMD products in almost every application. If performance is dropped after sale, there’s a pretty good chance of a class action suit.
Intel might have a situation here like the XBox 360 Red Ring of Death. Totally kills any momentum they had and hands a big victory to their competitor. This at a time when Intel wasn’t in a strong place to begin with.
I think a spot that might land them in a bit of hot water will be what specs they use for the chips after the “fix”. Will they update the specs to reflect the now slower speeds? My money would be them still listing the full chooch chip killing specs.
If people bought it at one spec and now it’s lower, that could be enough. It would have made the decision different at purchase time.
It would be breach of implied warranty/false advertisement if they keep selling them with the old specs at least.
It has been wise for years to subtract 15-20% off Intel’s initial performance claims and benchmarks at release. Spectre and Meltdown come to mind, for example. There’s always some post-release patch that hobbles the performance, even when the processors are stable. Intel’s corporate culture is to push the envelope just a little too far then walk it back quietly after the initial positive media coverage is taken care of.
Yes, but lucky for some of us that practice is still illegal in parts of the world. I just don’t get why they still get away with it (they do get fines but the over all practice is still normalized).
I sure would not want any 13 or 14 gen Intel in any equipment I was responsible for. Think of the risk over any IT departments head with these CPUs in production, you would never really trust them again.
No refunds for the fried ones should be all you need to see about hwp they “handle” this.
They probably will at least RMA the really frequently crashing ones. To my knowledge they self-reported when they discovered the problem and the fix so they’d be looking at a lawsuit if they didn’t do at least that.
How much further beyond that they’ll go is what we still have to see. If they have a crazy number of CPUs still dying at 4-5 years old and don’t cover with an extended warranty than fuck em…But we have to wait and see what they actually do first before making that judgement.
For what it’s worth my i9-13900 was experiencing serious instability issues. Disabling turbo helped a lot but Intel offered to replace it under warranty and I’m going through that now. Customer support on the issue seems to be pretty good from my experience.
A few years ago now I was thinking that it was about time for me to upgrade my desktop (with a case that dates back to 2000 or so, I guess they call them “sleepers” these days?) because some of my usual computer things were taking too long.
And I realized that Intel was selling the 12th generation of the Core at that point, which means the next one was a 13th generation and I dono, I’m not superstitious but I figured if anything went wrong I’d feel pretty darn silly. So I pulled the trigger and got a 12th gen core processor and motherboard and a few other bits.
This is quite amusing in retrospect.
I recently built myself a computer, and went with AMD’s 3d cache chips and boy am I glad. I think I went 12th Gen for my brothers computer but it was mid range which hasn’t had these issues to my knowledge.
Also yes, sleeper is the right term.
I think I went 12th Gen for my brothers computer
12th gen isn’t affected. The problem affects only the 13th and 14th gen Intel chips. If your brother has 12th gen – and you might want to confirm that – he’s okay.
For the high-end thing, initially it was speculated that it was just the high-end chips in these generations, but it’s definitely the case that chips other than just the high-end ones have been recorded failing. It may be that the problem is worse with the high-end CPUs, but it’s known to not be restricted to them at this point.
The bar they list in the article here is 13th and 14th gen Intel desktop CPUs over 65W TDP.
We are giving this failed management team billions of dollars to build “us” a fab
🤡🤡🤡
Even worse, there were no conditions to the funding. They just wrote a check.
damn… can you provide more context.
watch end up like nation wide broadband lol
never built and patchy bullshit we did get we get price gouged and dissed by comcast and co
Profit over everything is involved, it will happen. Although if they kill it with the development, they will have so much more later. They just cannot do it though, short term money go brrrr.
Surely this will never backfire on taxpayers.
Any real world comparison. Gaming frame rate, video encoding… The 13-700 beats the 7900x while being more energy efficient and costing less.
That’s even giving AMD a handicap in the comparison since the 7700x is supposed to be the direct comparison to the 13-700.
I say all this as a longggg time AMD CPU customer. I had planned on buying their CPU before multiple different sources of comparison steered me away this time.
Ok, so maybe you are missing the part where the 13 and 14 gens are destroying themselves. No one really cares if you use AMD or what not, this little issue is intel and makes any performance,power use or cost moot as the cpu’s ability to not hurt itself in its confusion will now always be in question.
Also I don’t think CPU speeds have been a large bottleneck in the last few years, why both AMD and Intel keep pushing is just silly.
Yeah that does suck. But I was replying specifically to the person saying Intel hasn’t been relevant for years because of a supposed performance dominance from AMD. That’s part just isn’t true.
Your comment does not reply to anyone though, its just floating out there on its own.
And even taken as a reply it still does not make sense since as of this “issue” any 13th or 14th gen Intel over a 600 is out of the running since they can not be trusted to not kill themselves.
Yeah not really sure how my comment ended up where it is. Connect stacks comments in a weird way and I must have clicked reply in the wrong place.
I was replying to this …
Is there really still such a market for Intel CPUs? I do not understand that AMDs Zen is so much better and is the superior technology since almost a decade now.
…Which up untill this issue was NOT true. The entire Zen 2 line was a step behind the Intel chips that released at the same times as it.
I’ve been running a 3600x for years now and love it … But a i5-10600k that came out at the same time absolutely smashes it in performance.
Those came out a year apart and no one does not “smash” the other in performance. I doubt you can even notice the difference between the two, and that is the issue with CPUs today, they are not the bottleneck in most systems. I have used both of these (I like the 10600k as well) but they are almost exactly the same “performance” and would not turn up my nose at ether. The issue is that (especially in personal use cases) there is no justification in the newer systems. DDR4 still runs literally everything and both of these 4 year+ year old CPUs (that are now a few gens old) also will run anything well outside of exotic cases. You are more likely to see slowdowns with a lack of ram (since most programs today seem to think the stuff is unlimited), GPU bottlenecks, or just badly optimized software.
I have an Intel Core i9-14900K 3.2 GHz 24-Core LGA 1700 Processor purchased in March. Is there any guesses for the window yet of potential affected CPUs?
The window is the whole gen and the gen before it for any chips over 600. You are in this picture.
Yay. Fun times all around.
Yeah, this is going to be a mess for years. I am not even sure if they have enough chips for replacement.
I would suggest getting a new cpu and then locking that cpu down to a set speed.
You’re in it. Get those bios updates and look into undervolting your CPU ASAP.
So the bios update wouldn’t already put my chip within safer operating parameters? I also have to undervolt it?
It will put it into “safe” parameters, but I mean you should give it an additional undervolt to increase its longevity.
I mostly worry about future performance being undervolted too much, since I sometimes do heavy animation work.
Yeah Intel really needs to recall these things. This shit isn’t right.
So like, did Intel lay off or deprecate its QA teams similar to what Microsoft did with Windows? Remember when stability was key and everything else was secondary? Pepperidge farms remembers.
Why would they lay off their QA teams when its management and executives who make the decisions to cut corners?
The QA teams are the corners being cut.
Amd processors have literally always been a better value and rarely have been surpassed by much for long. The only problem they ever had was back in the day they overheated easily. But I will never ever buy an Intel processor on purpose, especially after this.
The only problem they ever had was back in the day they overheated easily.
Very easily.
In college (early aughts), I worked as tech support for fellow students. Several times I had to take the case cover off, point a desktop fan into the case, and tell the kid he needed to get thermal paste and a better cooler (services we didn’t offer).
Also, as others have said, AMD CPUs have not always been superior to Intel in performance or even value (though AMDs have almost always been cheaper). It’s been a back-and-forth race for much of their history.
Yeah. I never said they were always better in performance. But I have never had an issue other than the heat problem which all but one time was fully my fault. And I don’t need a processor to perform 3% better on random tasks… which was the kind of benchmark results I would typically find when comparing similar AMD/intel processors (also in some categories amd did win). I saved probably a couple grand avoiding Intel. And as another user said, I prefer to support the underdog. The company making a great product for a lot less money. Again I say: fuck Intel.
rarely have been surpassed by much for long.
I’ve been on team AMD for over 20 years now but that’s not true. The CoreDuo and the first couple of I CPUS were better than what AMD was offering and were for a decade. The Athlon were much better than the Pentium 3 and P4, the Ryzen are better than the current I series but the Phenom weren’t. Don’t get me wrong, I like my Phenom II X4 but it objectively wasn’t as good as Intel’s offerings back in the day.
My i5-4690 and i7-4770 machines remain competitive to this day, even with spectre patches in place. I saw no reason to ‘upgrade’ to 6/7/8th gen CPUs.
I’m looking for a new desktop now, but for the costs involved I might just end up parting together a HP Z6 G4 with server surplus cpu/ram. The costs of going to 11th+ desktop Intel don’t seem worth it.
I’m going to look at the more recent AMD offerings, but I’m not sure they’ll compete with surplus server kit.
I’d say that regardless of the brand, X86 CPU don’t need to be upgraded as often as they used to. No awesome new extension like SSE or something like that, not much more powerful, power consumption not going down significantly. If you don’t care about power consumption, the server CPU will be more interesting, there’s no doubt about that.
They’re still useful, but they’re not competitive in overall performance with recent CPUs in the same category. They do still compete with some of the budget and power-efficient CPUs, but they use more power and get hotter.
That said, those 4th gen Intel CPUs are indeed good enough for most everyday computing tasks. They won’t run Windows 11 because MS locks them out, but they will feel adequately fast unless you’re doing pretty demanding stuff.
I still have an i5-2400, an i7-4770K and an i7-6700 for occasional or server use, and my i7-8550U laptop runs great with Linux (though it overheated with Windows).
I buy AMD now though.
My issue with surplus server kit at home is that it tends to idle at very high power usage compared to desktop kit. For home use that won’t be pushing high CPU utilization, the savings in cost off eBay aren’t worth much.
This is also why you’re seeing AM5 on server motherboards. If you don’t need to have tons of PCIe lanes–and especially with PCIe 5, you probably don’t–the higher core count AM5 chips do really well for servers.
The only problem they ever had was back in the day they overheated easily.
That’s not true. It was just last year that some of the Ryzen 7000 models were burning themselves out from the insides at default settings (within AMD specs) due to excessive SoC voltage. They fixed it through new specs and working with board manufacturers to issue new BIOS, and I think they eventually gave in to pressure to cover the damaged units. I guess we’ll see if Intel ends up doing the same.
I generally agree with your sentiment, though. :)
I just wish both brands would chill. Pushing the hardware so hard for such slim gains is wasting power and costing customers.
That was asus applying too much voltage to the x3d skus
Where do you think Asus got the specs for that voltage?
Then why were there essentially no blow ups from other motherboard manufacturers? Tell me if my information on this is wrong, but when there’s only one brand causing issues then they’re the ones to blame for it.
Then why were there essentially no blow ups from other motherboard manufacturers?
There were, including MSI, who also released corrected BIOS versions.
(But even if that were not the case, it could be explained by Asus being the only board maker to use the high end of a voltage range allowed by AMD, or by Asus having a significantly larger share of users who are vocal about such problems.)
Not from AMD. From the autogenerated transcript (with minor edits where it messed up the names of things):
amd’s official recommendation [f]or the cut off now is 1.3 volts but the board vendors can still technically set whatever they want so even though the [AGESA] update can lock down and start restricting the voltage the problem is Asus their 1.3 number manifests itself as something like 1.34 volts so it is still on the high side
This was pretty much all on motherboard manufacturers, and ASUS was particularly bad (out scumbaging MSI, good job, guys).
At the start of this Intel mess, it was thought they had a similar issue on their hands and motherboard manufactures just needed to get in line, but it ended up going a lot deeper.
That doesn’t contradict anything I wrote. Note that it says AMD’s recommended cutoff is now 1.3 volts, implying that it wasn’t before this mess began. Note also that the problem was worse on Asus boards because their components’ tolerance was a bit too loose for a target voltage this high, not because they used a voltage target beyond AMD’s specified cutoff. If the cutoff hadn’t been pushed so high for this generation in the first place, that same tolerance probably would have been okay.
In any case, there’s no sense in bickering about it. Asus was not without blame (I was upset with them myself) but also not the only affected brand, so it’s not possible that they were the cause of the underlying problem, now is it?
AMD and Intel have been pushing their CPUs to very high voltages and temperatures for small performance gains recently. 95°C as the new “normal” was unheard of just a few years ago. It’s no surprise that it led to damage in some cases, especially for early adopters. It’s a thin line to walk.
Problem is that it’s getting extremely hard to get more single-threaded performance out of a chip, and this is one of the few ways to do so. And a lot of software is not going to be rewritten to use multiple cores. In some cases, it’s fundamentally impossible to parallelize a particular algorithm.
Yeah. I just meant AMD cpus used to easily overheat if your cooling system had an issue. My ryzen 7 3700x has been freaking awesome though. Feels more solid than any PC I’ve built. And it’s fast AF. I think I saved over $150 when comparing to a similarly rated Intel CPU. And the motherboards generally seem cheaper for AMD too. I would feel ripped off with Intel even without the crashing issues
That’s not true. It was just last year that some of the Ryzen 7000 models were burning themselves
I think he was referring to “back-in-the-day” when Athlons, unlike the competing Pentium 3 and 4 CPUs of the day, didn’t have any thermal protections and would literally go up in smoke if you ran them without cooling.
When I started using computers, I wasn’t aware of any thermal protections in popular CPUs. Do you happen to know when they first appeared in Intel chips?
Pentium 2 and 3 had rudimentary protection. They would simply shutdown if they got too hot. Pentium 4 was the first one that would throttle down clock speeds.
Anything before that didn’t have any protection as far as I’m aware.
Some motherboards did have overheating protection back then though. Personally I had my Athlon XP computer randomly shut down several times back then, because the system had some issue, where fans would randomly start slowing down and eventually completely stop. This then triggered overheat protection of the motherboard, which simply cut the power as soon as the temperature was too hight.
I have a 13 series chip, it had some reproducible crashing issues that so far have subsided by downclocking it. It is in the window they’ve shared for the oxidation issue. At this point there’s no reliable way of knowing to what degree I’m affected, by what type of issue, whether I should wait for the upcoming patch or reach out to see if they’ll replace it.
I am not happy about it.
Obviously next time I’d go AMD, just on principle, but this isn’t the 90s anymore. I could do a drop-in replacement to another Intel chip, but switching platforms is a very expensive move these days. This isn’t just a bad CPU issue, this could lead to having to swap out two multi-hundred dollar componenet, at least on what should have been a solidly future-proof setup for at least five or six years.
I am VERY not happy about it.
When did you buy it? Depending on the credit card you have, they will sometimes extend on any manufacturer warranty by a year or two. Might be worth checking.
Are there like no consumer guarantees in the US? How is this not a open and shut case where the manufacturer needs to replace or refund the product?
Nope, pretty much none in most cases. Though this is probably going to devolve into a giant class-action, because it is pretty egregious… so affected people will get something like $6.71 and the lawyers will walk away with a couple billion or whatever.
Neat 👍 that sucks
I’m angry on your behalf. If you have to downclock the part so that it works, then you’ve been scammed. It’s fraud to sell a part as a higher performing part when it can’t deliver that performance.
So here’s the thing about that, the real performance I lose is… not negligible, but somewhere between 0 and 10% in most scenarios, and I went pretty hard keeping the power limits low. Once I set it up this way, realizing just how much power and heat I’m saving for the last few few drops of performance made me angrier than having to do this. The dumb performance race with all the built-in overclocking has led to these insanely power hungry parts that are super sensitive to small defects and require super aggressive cooling solutions.
I would have been fine with a part rated for 150W instead of 250 that worked fine with an air cooler. I could have chosen whether to push it. But instead here we are, with extremely expensive motherboards massaging those electrons into a firehose automatically and turning my computer into a space heater for the sake of bragging about shaving half a milisecond per frame on CounterStrike. It’s absurd.
None of which changes that I got sold a bum part, Intel is fairly obviously trying to weasel out of the obviously needed recall and warranty extension and I’m suddenly on the hook for close to a grand in superfluous hardware next time I want to upgrade because my futureproof parts are apparently made of rust and happy thoughts.
Could you not have just bought a lower power chip then?
Or does that loose you cores?
Oh, I absolutely could have. It would lose a couple of cores, but the 13th gen is pretty linear, it would have performed more or less the same.
Thing is, I couldn’t have known that then, could I? Chip reviews aren’t aiming at normalizing for temps, everybody is reviewing for moar pahwah. So is there a way for me to know that gimping this chip to run silently basically gets me a slightly overclocked 13600K? Not really. Do I know, even at this point, that getting a 13600K wouldn’t deliver the same performance but require my fans to be back to sounding noticeable? I don’t know that.
Because the actual performance of these is not to a reliable spec other than “run flat out and see how much heat your thermal solution can soak” there is no good way to evaluate these for applications that aren’t just that without buying them and checking. Maybe I could have saved a hundred bucks. Maybe not. Who knows?
This is less of a problem if you buy laptops, but for casual DIY I frankly find the current status quo absurd.
150W instead of 250
Yeah, when I saw that the CPU could pull 250W, I initially thought that it was a misprint in the spec sheet. That is kind of a nutty number. I have a space heater that can run at low at 400W, which is getting into that range, and you can get very low-power space heaters that consume less power than the TDP on that processor. That’s an awful lot of heat to be putting into an incredibly small, fragile part.
That being said, I don’t believe that Intel intentionally passed the initial QA for the 13th generation thinking that there were problems. They probably thought there was a healthy safety margin. You can certainly blame them for insufficient QA or for how they handled the problem as the issue was ongoing, though.
And you could also have said “this is absurd” at many times in the past when other performance barriers came up. I remember – a long time ago now – when the idea of processors that needed active cooling or they would destroy themselves seemed rather alarming and fragile. I mean, fans do fail. Processors capable of at least shutting down on overheat to avoid destroying themselves, or later throttling themselves, didn’t come along until much later. But if we’d stopped with passive heatsink cooling, we’d be using far slower systems (though probably a lot quieter!)
You’re not wrong, but “we’ve been winging it for decades” is not necessarily a good defense here.
That said, I do think they did look at their performance numbers and made a conscious choice to lean into feeding these more power and running them hotter, though. Whether the impact would be lower with more conservative power specs is debatable, but as you say there are other reasons why trying to fake generational leaps by making CPUs capable of fusing helium is not a great idea.
Went 13th -> 14th very early in both’s launch cycles because of chronic crashing. After about swapping mobo, RAM and SSDs i finally swapped to AMD and my build from late 2022 is FINALLY stable. Wendell’s video was the catalyst to jump ship. I thought I was going crazy, but yea… it was intel
Whoa, that’s even worse. It’s not just the uncertainty of knowing whether Intel will replace your hardware or the cost of jumping ship next time. Intel straight up owes you money. That sucks.
Yea, my crashes were either watchdog BSODs, or nvldkkm (nvidia). So diagnosing the issue was super difficult, the CPU is the last thing I think of unless there’s some evidence of it failing :).
I also got to experience a cable mod adapter burn a 4090… Zotac replaced the card thank god. I’m a walking billboard of what went wrong in the last 2 years with components lol.
Anyhow I hope we all get a refund. My PC is my main hobby so having instability caused a ton of frustration and anguish.
I have a 13 series chip, it had some reproducible crashing issues that so far have subsided by downclocking it.
From the article:
the company confirmed a patch is coming in mid-August that should address the “root cause” of exposure to elevated voltage. But if your 13th or 14th Gen Intel Core processor is already crashing, that patch apparently won’t fix it.
Citing unnamed sources, Tom’s Hardware reports that any degradation of the processor is irreversible, and an Intel spokesperson did not deny that when we asked.
If your CPU is already crashing then that’s it, game over. The upcoming patch cannot fix it. You’ve got to figure out if you can do a warranty replacement or continue to live with workarounds like you’re doing now.
Their retail boxed CPUs usually have a 3(?) year warranty so for a 13th gen CPU you may be midway or at the tail end of that warranty period. If it’s OEM, etc. it could be a 1 year warranty aka Intel isn’t doing anything about it unless a class action suit forces them :/
The whole situation sucks and honestly seems a bit crazy that Intel hasn’t already issued a recall or dealt with this earlier.
The article is… not wrong, but oversimplifying. There seem to be multiple faults at play here, some would continue to degrade, others would prevent you from recovering some performance threshold, but may be prevented from further damage, others may be solved. Yes, degradation of the chip may be irreversible, if it’s due to the oxidation problem or due to the incorrect voltages having cuased damage, but presumably in some cases the chip would continue to work stable and not degenerate further with the microcode fixes.
But yes, agreed, the situation sucks and Intel should be out there disclosing a range of affected chips by at least the confirmed physical defect and allowing a streamlined recall of affected devices, not saying “start an RMA process and we’ll look into it”.
If you’re in the UK or I expect EU, I imagine if it’s due to oxidation you can get it replaced even on an expired warranty as it’s a defect which was known to either you or intel before the warranty expired, and a manufacturing defect rather than breaking from use, so intel are pretty much in a corner about having sold you faulty shit
switching platforms is a very expensive move these days.
It’s just a motherboard and a cpu. Everything else is cross compatible, likely even your cpu cooler. If you just buy another intel chip… it’s just gonna oxidize again.
$370 for a 7800x3d https://www.microcenter.com/product/674503/amd-ryzen-7-7800x3d-raphael-am5-42ghz-8-core-boxed-processor-heatsink-not-included
~$200 for a motherboard.
Personally i’d wait for the next release to drop in a month… or until your system crashes aren’t bearable / it’s worth making the change. I just don’t see the cost as prohibitive, it’s about on par with all the alternatives. Plus you could sell your old motherboard for something.
I mean, happy for you, but in the real world a 200 extra dollars for a 400 dollar part is a huge price spike.
Never mind that, be happy for me, I actually went for a higher spec than that when I got this PC because I figured I’d get at least one CPU upgrade out of this motherboard, since it was early days of DDR5 and it seemed like I’d be able to both buy faster RAM and a faster CPU to keep my device up to date. So yeah, it was more expensive than that.
And hey, caveat emptor, futureproofing is a risky, expensive game on PCs. I was ready for a new technology to make me upgrade anyway, if we suddenly figured out endless storage or instant RAM or whatever. Doesn’t mean it isn’t crappy to suddenly make upgrading my CPU almost twice as expensive because Intel sucks at their one job.
It’s just nearly $600. Practically free.
How much does it cost to fix a 14900k?
I’m not really that knowledgeable about AM5 mobos (still on AM4) but you should be able to get something perfectly sensible for 100 bucks. Are you going to get as much IO and bells and whistles no but most people don’t need that stuff and you don’t have to spend a lot of money to get a good VRM or traces to the DIMM slots.
Then, possibly bad news: Intel Gen 13 supports DDR4, so you might need new RAM.
No, I have a DDR5 setup. Which is why my motherboard was way more expensive than 100 bucks.
The problem isn’t upgrading to a entry level AM5 motherboard, the problem is that to get back to where I am with my rather expensive Intel motherboard I have to spend a lot more than that. Moving to AMD doesn’t mean I want to downgrade.
I mean… back in the days I would never have bought a uATX board. You need expansion slots, after all, video, sound, TV, network, at least.
Nowadays? Exactly one PCIe slot occupied by the graphics card. Soundcards are pointless nowadays if your onboard doesn’t suffice for what you want to do you’d get an external audio interface, have it away from all that EM interference in the case, TV we’ve got the internet, NIC is onboard and as I won’t downgrade my network to wifi that’s not needed, either.
As far as I’m concerned pretty much all of my boards were an upgrade while also simultaneously becoming more and more budget.
32GB of ddr5 can be found for ~$100, and any other upgrade from a ddr4 platform today is going to require new memory.
So the DDR4 13th series folks can stay on their oxidized processors, or they can pay money to get something else. Not much else to do there.
I upgraded my AM4 platform system to a 5800x3d a while back and it’s still working just fine. I wouldn’t recommend people buying into AM4 today just because no more upgrades are coming… but AM5? why not? It’ll be around until ddr6 is affordable circa 2027.
I’m super interested in seeing how intel’s 15th gen turns out. We know it’s a new socket so the buy in cost is sky high as all have argued here (that mobo/cpu/ram is crazy expensive.) I can only imagine they will drop power load to avoid more issues but who can say. Maybe whatever design they are using won’t have been so aggressively tuned or if they’re lucky hasn’t started physical production so they can modify it appropriately. Time will tell, and we won’t know if it has the same issue for a year or so post release.
They do say that you can contact Intel customer support if you have an affected CPU, and that they’re replacing CPUs that have been actually damaged. I don’t know – and Intel may not know – what information or proof you need, but my guess is that it’s good odds that you can get a replacement CPU. So there probably is some level of recourse.
Now, obviously that’s still a bad situation. You’re out the time that you didn’t have a stable system, out the effort you put into diagnosing it, maybe have losses from system downtime (like, I took an out-of-state trip expecting to be able to access my system remotely and had it hang due to the CPU damage at one point), maybe out data you lost from corruption, maybe out money you spent trying to fix the problem (like, on other parts).
But I’d guess that specifically for the CPU, if it’s clearly damaged, you have good odds of being able to at least get a non-damaged replacement CPU at some point without needing to buy it. It may not perform as well as the generation had initially been benchmarked at. But it should be stable.
“Clearly damaged” is an interesting problem. The CPU would crash 100% of the time on the default settings for the motherboard, but if you remember, they issued a patch already.
I patched. And guess what, with the new Intel Defaults it doesn’t crash anymore. But it suddenly runs very hot instead. Like, weird hot. On a liquid cooling system it’s thermal throttling when before it wouldn’t come even close. Won’t crash, though.
So is it human error? Did I incorrectly mount my cooling? I’d say probably not, considering it ran cool enough pre-patch until it became unstable and it runs cool enough now with a manual downclock. But is that enough for Intel to issue a replacement if the system isn’t unstable? More importantly, do I want to have that fight with them now or to wait and see if their upcoming patch, which allegedly will fix whatever incorrect voltage requests the CPU is making, fixes the overheating issue? Because I work on this thing, I can’t just chuck it in a box, send it to Intel and wait. I need to be up and running immediately.
So yeah, it sucks either way, but it would suck a lot less if Intel was willing to flag a range of CPUs as being eligible for a recall.
As I see it right now, the order of operations is to wait for the upcoming patch, retest the default settings after the patch and if the behavior seems incorrect contact Intel for a replacement. I just wish they would make it clearer what that process is going to be and who is eligible for one.
Replacing it with what exactly. Another 13/14th gen chip?
Yeah. They can’t replace it with their upcoming 15th gen, because that uses a new, incompatible socket. They’d apparently been handing replacement CPUs out to large customers to replace failed processors, according to one of Steve Burke’s past videos on the subject.
On a motherboard that has the microcode update which they’re theoretically supposed to get out in a month or so, the processors should at least refrain from destroying themselves, though I expect that they’ll probably run with some degree of degraded performance from the update.
Just guessing, not anything Burke said, but if there’s enough demand for replacement CPUs, might also be possible that they’ll do another 14th gen production run, maybe fixing the oxidation issue this time, so that the processors could work as intended.
Thankfully I haven’t had any issues out of my 13700k but it’s pretty shitty of Intel to not stand behind their products and do a recall.
Ryzens are so gonna sell like hot cakes after this lol. 😅
And the Threadrippers are gonna cook like hot cakes
Who buys a thread ripper when the 7800x3d exists?
Because I still have 1st gen ryzen and I’m out of the loop
Now you can buy a 7800x3d and be good for the next decade!
People who do productivity workloads, and not just gaming
Hey, my gaming workloads are productive…
Me too, if procastination is a productivity workload 😅
Heat management is what separates the casuals from the enthusiasts.
Looks like your “intermittent explosive disorder” has miraculously cured itself
So here goes my reason to buy the new gen laptop
I wouldn’t conclude that from an Intel Employee even if they did claim it because they(Intel) already lied multiple times in this afair.
But they didn’t even do that, they just said desktop processors are affected, this doesn’t say mobile ones are not.
Many companies have already reported that their telemetry records many crashes with the exact same symptoms and software on their laptops while AMD still isn’t affected.
Source?
Mind, that this is just the company which published the initial reports that the defects in desktop CPUs are systematic, so I can see why Toms Hardware deems their Post a reliable source.
I’m assuming it doesn’t affect them as much because they run at lower power.
Is this resulting from Intel’s use of hidden Minix OS in their CPUs?
I don’t think we’ve been given any reason to believe this was caused by Intel Management Engine.
Is there really still such a market for Intel CPUs? I do not understand that AMDs Zen is so much better and is the superior technology since almost a decade now.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_available.html#xy_scatter_graph Don’t see data backing up your claim across a wide range of perf
Why does that graph show Epyc (server) and Threadripper (workstation) processors in the upper right corner, but not the equivalent Xeons? If you take those away, it would paint a different picture.
Also, a price/performance graph does not say much about which is the superior technology. Intel has been struggling to keep up with AMD technologically the past years, and has been upping power targets and thermal limits to do so … which is one of the reasons why we are here points at headline.
I do hope they get their act together, because we an AMD monopoly would just be as bad as an Intel monopoly. We need the competition, and a healthy x86 market, lest proprietary ARM based computers take over the market (Apple M-chips, Snapdragon laptops,…)
Id guess because I selected single processors and many of the xeons are server oriented with multi socket expected. Given the original post I’m responding to I’m more concerned by desktop grade (10-40k pts multi core) than server grade.
I guess I’m confused by your fundamental point though: if we aren’t looking for raw processing power on a range of workloads, what is the technology you see them winning in?
Aha because if they included the xeon scalables it show how bad they are doing in the datacenter market.
Why not reserve that frothing at the mouth hatred for something that deserves it.
I don’t see data backing up your claim […]
Links a list where the three top spots substantiate the claim, followed by a comparatively large 8% drop.
To add a bit of nuance: There are definitely exceptions to the claim. But if I had to make a blanket statement, it would absolutely be in favor of AMD.
The point of the chart is that it alternates over a wide performance range, there isn’t a blanket winner between the company that can’t figure out security and the company that can’t figure out thermals.
Intel is in the precarious position of being the largest surviving American owned semiconductor manufacturer, with the competition either existing abroad (TSMC, Samsung, ASML) or as a partner/subsidiary of a foreign national firm (NVidia simply procures its chips from TSMC, GlobalFoundries was bought up by the UAE sovereign wealth fund, etc).
Consequently, whenever the US dumps a giant bucket of money into the domestic semiconductor industry, Intel is there to clean up whether or not their technology actually works.
Small correction: only surviving that makes desktop/server class chips. Companies like Texas Instruments and Microchip still have US foundries for microcontrollers.
Naw. Zen was a leap ahead when it came out but AMD didn’t keep that pace long and Intel CPUs quickly caught up.
I just almost bought a Ryzen 9 7900x but a i7-13700k ended up being cheaper and outperforms the AMD chip.
13th gen, i7-13700k. (!)
On what workloads? AMD is king for most games, and for less price. It’s also king for heavily multicore workloads, but not on the same CPU as for games.
In other words, they don’t have a CPU that is king for both at the same time. That’s the one thing Intel was good at, provided you could cool the damn thing.
Prebuilts and laptops
The new AMD generation kinda tossed all the good out the window. Now they are the more expensive option and even with this Intel fuckup they are likely still going to be the go to for people that have more sense then money.
Funny that the good old zen 3 stuff is still swinging above its weight class.
AMD keeps some older generations in production as their budget options - and as they had excellent CPUs for multiple generations now you also get pretty good computers out of that. Even better - with some planning you’ll be able to upgrade to another CPU later when checking chipset lifecycle.
AMD has established by now that they deliver what they promise - and intel couldn’t compete with them for a few generations over pretty much the complete product line - so they can afford now to have the bleeding edge hardware at higher prices. It’s still far away from what intel was charging when they were dominant 10 years ago - and if you need that performance for work well worth the money. For most private systems I’d always recommend getting last gen, though.
They have a small part of the market, they very much can not afford to have an entire generation of chips that have memory channel problems, have less performance then the gen before for the first 6 months and costs more then their competitor.
If they keep making zen 3 until this phase of insanity passes then good, but this chasing pointless gains at the cost of everything needs to end.
Its the only chip that runs on open source bios and you can completely disable the Intel ME after boot up.
AMD’s PSP is 100% proprietary spyware that can’t be disabled or manipulated into not running.
Intels have been working in my Linux server better than AMD. The AMDs kept causing server crashes due to C-state nonsense that no amount of BIOS tweaking would fix. AMD is great for performance and efficiency (and cost/value) in my gaming PC but wreaking havoc with my server which I need to be reliably functional without power restarts.
So I have both.
The argument was that while AMD is better on paper in most things, Intel would give you rock solid stability. That argument has now taken an Iowa-class broadside to the face.
I don’t watch LTT anymore, but a few years back they had a video where they were really pushing the limits of PCIe lanes on an Epyc chip by stuffing it full of NVMe drives and running them with software RAID (which Epyc’s sick number of cores should be able to handle). Long story short, they ran into a bunch of problems. After talking to Wendel of Level1Techs, he mentioned that sometimes, AMD just doesn’t work the way it seems it should based on paper specs. Intel usually does. (Might be getting a few details wrong about this, but the general gist should be right.)
This argument was almost the only thing stopping AMD from taking over the server market. The other thing was AMD simply being able to manufacture enough chips in a short time period. The server market is huge; Intel had $16B revenue in “Data Center and AI” in 2023, while AMD’s total revenue was $23B. Now manufacturing ramp up might be all that’s stopping AMD from owning it.
Should be this vid: https://youtu.be/uY_jeaxVgIE
Intel’s iGPU is still the by far the best option for applications such as media transcoding. It’s a shame that AMD haven’t focussed more on this but understandable, it’s relatively niche.
