Earlier this month, we wrote that some of Intel’s recent high-end Core i9 and Core i7 processors had been crashing and exhibiting other weird issues in some games and that Intel was investigating the cause.
An Intel statement obtained by Igor’s Lab suggests that Intel’s investigation is wrapping up, and the company is pointing squarely in the direction of enthusiast motherboard makers that are turning up power limits and disabling safeguards to try to wring a little more performance out of the processors.
“While the root cause has not yet been identified, Intel has observed the majority of reports of this issue are from users with unlocked/overclock capable motherboards,” the statement reads. “Intel has observed 600/700 Series chipset boards often set BIOS defaults to disable thermal and power delivery safeguards designed to limit processor exposure to sustained periods of high voltage and frequency.”
I’ve been reading news about this for a bit.
I believe that I may have damaged an i9-13900KF with stock Asus motherboard settings myself (though I can still make it work by disabling all but one core, sees constant problems now with multiple cores active).
If you’re getting one of these yourself, no joke, give serious consideration to using more-conservative-then-stock-motherboard settings.
I never choose to mess with overclocking. This situation would have burned someone like me who assumes defaults are safer. What a mess.
Yeah, I could believe that there would be overclocking settings in a BIOS that would let you damage a CPU. I just was also thinking that whatever motherboard vendors chose as defaults wouldn’t. But, well, I suppose that their own qualification process might not be as rigorous as Intel’s.
In the past it has been considered pretty safe to play with a moderate OC because the CPUs have decent thermal protection built in. Seems like that era might be over.
Any guidance on choosing appropriate conservative settings for i7-13700K? I may be hit with the same as you in the future (sometimes I have to do some heavy multithreaded combinatorial computations which run several days with 100°C temperature, using all cores). The motherboard has options for customising pretty much everything there is, but I didn’t touch anything overclocking-related, so I have Asus defaults.
The article has a bunch of settings that they say that Intel’s flagged as “don’t use”. Intel will be a better source than me.
I see, thanks. Will check. I just thought perhaps you figured out something other than those from your experience.
Did thoes defaults include XMP though? XMP is also overclocking.
On my own motherboard, it is a default, but the article doesn’t list it as being a setting believed to be problematic from a CPU damage standpoint.
I guess not for your specific cpu, but Asus fried some ryzen 7000 cpus with XMP last year