Is There A Crashing Problem With 13th And 14th Gen Intel Core CPUs?

Is It Overclocking Or Will We See An Update?

A small number of Intel system owners are reporting seeing frequent crashes when gaming and benchmarking their Core i9 13900K or 14900K.  The crashes are repeatable, especially in specific games developed by RAD on Unreal Engine but extend to tests like RealBench, CineBench, Prime95, Handbrake, and Visual Studio.  The crashes have been traced back to processors with specific BIOS settings for clock rates and power usage.

The findings do suggest that backing off on those settings should restore stability, or if it is happening at default settings then better cooling or a new power supply should resolve the issue.  This does bring up an interesting question, and one which has been asked before; why would Intel allow these settings to be applied if they introduce instability.  A software developer by the name of Dan Luu has been watching this sort of thing for almost a decade and he has noticed a decline in the chip verification process at Intel.  That decline has allowed these edge case scenarios to become far more common; to be fair the ever increasing complexity of our chips makes proper verification much more difficult that it was just a few years ago.

If you are running into this issue, the suggestion is to set “SVID behavior” to “Intel fail safe in your BIOS and consider reducing the “Long duration power limit,” and “Short duration power limit” if that doesn’t resolve the issue.  Intel has yet to comment and it will be interesting to see if they prefer to blame the motherboard BIOS settings or if we see a small microcode patch released to address the issue.