Intel accused of selling ‘defective’ Raptor Lake CPUs

One game developer says it’s had enough of Intel’s 13th and 14th-generation Core microprocessors, calling them “defective.”

Australia-based indie dev studio Alderon Games made its frustrations with Intel’s latest chips public in a write-up titled, “Intel is selling defective 13-14th Gen CPUs,” authored by the studio’s founder Matthew Cassells.

“My team at Alderon Games, working on the multiplayer dinosaur survival game Path of Titans, has been encountering significant problems with Intel CPU stability,” he said. “These issues, including crashes, instability, and memory corruption, are confined to the 13th and 14th generation processors. Despite all released microcode, BIOS, and firmware updates, the problem remains unresolved.”

Stability issues on Raptor Lake processors first caught widespread attention in February, and have been linked to some of the first 13th Gen Raptor Lake CPUs that were launched in late 2022. The Core i9-13900K and Core i9-14900K, Intel’s top-end models, seem to be the most affected, and there are some reports that the cut-down Core i7-13700K and Core i7-14700K also have problems.

One of the telltale signs of these stability issues on Raptor Lake is the “out of video memory” error message that pops up in games such as Fortnite. Cassells claims that his studio has received thousands of crash reports from players using 13th and 14th-gen Core chips and that his development team has personally experienced “frequent instability” on their own Raptor Lake-powered PCs. The studio founder says servers running on these Intel CPUs have experienced “constant crashes.”

Intel has attempted to address these issues with new microcode distributed via motherboard BIOS updates and has also told motherboard makers to not enable extreme power modes by default.

For example, in some cases MSI motherboards set a power limit of 4,096 watts and 512 amps; no Intel CPU would ever use all that power, but it more or less sets no restraints on a chip’s automatic frequency boosting tech, and that seems to result in crashes.

That said, stability issues still persist and Intel hasn’t been entirely forthcoming on the root cause.

“Intel and its partners are continuing to investigate user reports regarding instability issues on Intel Core 13th and 14th generation (K/KF/KS) desktop processors,” it told The Register.

“We appreciate the Intel community’s patience on the matter and will share more details on the investigation as soon as possible. In the interim, we continue recommending that customers experiencing these issues please reach out to Intel customer support for next steps regarding their Intel Core 13th or 14th Gen (K/KF/KS) desktop processors.”

We’re switching to AMD and don’t buy Raptor Lake, Alderon Games says

But Cassells reckons there’s a more substantial underlying problem here than mere glitches of instability solved by motherboard configurations.

“Over the last 3–4 months, we have observed that CPUs initially working well deteriorate over time, eventually failing,” he claims. “The failure rate we have observed from our own testing is nearly 100%, indicating it’s only a matter of time before affected CPUs fail.”

Incidentally, this vulture just so happens to have given his old Intel Core i9-13900K to an acquaintance a couple of weeks ago, and it now no longer functions. This 13900K went into a gaming PC with a lower-end motherboard that by design can’t max out the chip’s power usage. Previously, it chugged along in SSD and GPU testing without issue.

Alderon Games has apparently lost its patience with Raptor Lake CPUs and says it’s switching all of its servers to AMD processors, as they apparently “experience 100 times fewer crashes compared to Intel CPUs that were found to be defective.”

Cassells also recommends players, whether they’re hosting their own servers or just playing a game, to avoid Raptor Lake processors. The dev has even implemented an in-game notification to tell its users that 13th and 14th-gen Intel chips are no good.

The Register has reached out to Alderon Games for further comment. ®