Back in February of this year we touched on No, Thank You Unreal Engine Game Crashes Reported in some High-End Intel i9 CPUs.
It’s gotten worse. Much worse. And it goes beyond Unreal Engine. It’s the Intel CPU itself. These models in particular, but not necessarily limited to only them:
Yes, it’s been rough times for 13th and 14th gen higher end Intel i9 gamers with the admission that there were some manufacturing issues that are leading to temps creating irreversible damage in the CPU. Intel is sucking up bad press like a Hoover on steroids — and rightly so, it seems. We don’t need to link any articles on the subject, because there are have been a barrage of them for weeks.
Just follow this video from Stephan at Gamers Nexus as he breaks it all down in chilling fashion.
Am a quiet fan of Gamers Nexus, btw. Like how they do things over there. Just saying.
Anyway, now Intel have issued a microcode patch to address the issues. If your CPU already is damaged, this won’t help, you need to get it replaced, but if you (and hopefully myself) don’t have the issue yet, well, this is for us. We need to get this tech medicine in the form of a bios update. Me? for my Alienware R15. Check wherever you got your 13th and 14th gen from for this bios update — and get it done ASAP.
Consider this a PGM PSA. As for how I feel about it? Not so good. Nobody wants to spend thousands on a high end desktop computer only to find out there are these kinds of issues. Electronics can be sensitive and simply buying something more expensive doesn’t mean you won’t have some sort of maintenance-related issues to deal with. It just hurts more when these systems aren’t throwaways.
Worse, from an editorial standpoint, I needed to bump this epic article on Pete Townsend of the The Who scheduled for this morning to talk about this. Ok, maybe that joke lands flat. Anyway, if you’ve been living under a tech rock lately and didn’t know about these Intel CPU issues and you have a 13th gen CPU, well, you need to look into this. It’s not just affecting i9 either, see that picture toward the top of this article from Intel themeselves, there are i5 and i7 in the mix, too. Bummer, bummer, bummer.