Intel has come out to publicly admit that it nonetheless hasn’t recognized the foundation reason for its high-end Core i9 Raptor Lake CPUs having instability points in video games. The Intel CPU crashing challenge that impacts a few of its thirteenth and 14th era CPUs as a substitute stays an ongoing level of investigation for the corporate.
The issues predominantly have an effect on variants of the Intel Core i9 14900K and 13900K variants (KF, KS, and so forth), which are the corporate’s present finest gaming CPU choices. Nevertheless, it will possibly additionally have an effect on the corporate’s Core i7 14700K and 13700K processors.
PCs primarily based on these CPUs have been crashing in some video games, significantly these primarily based on Unreal Engine 5. Past that, the specifics are obscure – as you may anticipate provided that Intel nonetheless hasn’t nailed down the reason for the difficulty. Nevertheless, the issue has been constant sufficient for any suggestion of person error or software program issues to be dominated out.
Extra lately, there had been hypothesis {that a} trigger had been discovered, which is that there’s an error within the microcode used to regulate the Enhanced Thermal Velocity Enhance (eTVB) characteristic of Intel’s top-tier processors. This characteristic mechanically will increase the clock pace of the processor so far as doable in accordance with how nicely the CPU is being cooled. If there’s thermal headroom, the CPU will push its pace larger and better.
Nevertheless, Intel has now come out and confirmed to Tom’s {Hardware} that, whereas this challenge is “doubtlessly contributing to instability, it’s not the foundation trigger.”
All that is off the again of Intel having stated it will challenge a public assertion on the issue again in Could 2024, however as but we’re nonetheless ready.
So what are you able to do to assist scale back the probabilities of this taking place to your Intel gaming PC? The principle piece of recommendation Intel has up to now instructed is replace the BIOS in your motherboard. Some time again, Intel launched a set of tips for default BIOS settings that motherboard producers have been implementing through BIOS updates.
These settings embody enabling C-states, Enhanced Thermal Velocity Enhance, Present Tour Safety (CEP), Thermal Velocity Enhance, and Thermal Velocity Enhance Voltage Optimizations by default. Intel additionally recommends having ICCMAX Limitless Bit set to disabled by default and TjMax offset set to 0.
Nevertheless, curiously, it doesn’t make any modifications to the ICCMax, ICCMax_App, and Energy Limits settings. These permit the chips to nonetheless draw giant quantities of energy, suggesting that Intel doesn’t imagine the difficulty is solely to do with the CPUs often drawing an excessive amount of energy. All you really want to know, although, is that in case you obtain the most recent BIOS in your motherboard it ought to a minimum of scale back the probabilities of these crashes.
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