Intel says it still doesn’t have a perfect fix for crashing i9 desktop chips

A strange trend has been observed in Intel’s highest-end desktop gaming processors for several months now Game crashes sometimes — And despite what you may have seen earlier today, Intel says it doesn’t yet have a final solution for its 13th and 14th Gen Intel Core i9 “Raptor Lake” and “Raptor Lake S” chips.

“Contrary to recent media reports, Intel has No A statement from Intel spokesperson Thomas Hannaford said, “The company has confirmed the root cause and, together with its partners, continues to investigate user reports of instability issues on unlocked Intel Core 13th and 14th Generation (K/KF/KS) desktop processors.”

It added: “The microcode patch referenced in press reports fixes an ETVB bug discovered by Intel while investigating instability reports. Although this issue is potentially contributing to the instability, it is not the root cause.”

Intel’s official statement references (and partially confirms) this: Leaked internal documents from Intel found Igor’s Laboratory earlier todayThose documents show that part of the problem is that Intel’s chips accidentally overclocked their cores, using a feature called Enhanced Thermal Velocity Boost (eTVB), even though they should have known they were getting too hot to do so.

The leaked document began by stating, “The root cause is an incorrect value in the microcode algorithm associated with the ETVB feature.” It further stated:

Failure analysis (FA) of 13th and 14th generation K SKU processors indicates a change in the minimum operating voltage on the affected processors, resulting from cumulative exposure to high core voltage. Intel® analysis has determined that a confirmed contributing factor to this issue is high voltage input to the processor, due to previous BIOS settings that allow the processor to operate at turbo frequencies and voltages, even when the processor is at high temperatures. Previous generations of Intel® K SKU processors were less sensitive to these types of settings due to lower default operating voltage and frequency.

Intel® urges all customers to update BIOS to microcode 0x125 or later by 7/19/2024.

This microcode includes an eTVB fix for an issue that could allow the processor to enter a high performance state even if the processor temperature exceeded the eTVB threshold,

But while Intel has confirmed that ETVB was potentially a part of the problem, it is apparently not the “root cause” of the entire issue.

Hope we will get a complete solution soon.