Intel’s 13th and 14th-gen desktop processors have been plagued by stability issues since late 2022, with users reporting sudden and unexpected crashes on PCs equipped with the company’s latest CPU models. After extensive analysis, Intel has finally identified the root cause of the problem and is working to roll out a fix by mid-August.
According to Intel, the instability issues are due to elevated operating voltage caused by a microcode algorithm sending incorrect voltage requests to the processor. The company has determined that this is the result of a microcode issue that has been sending incorrect voltage requests to the processor, leading to instability.
Intel has announced that it will release a microcode patch to address the issue, which is currently being validated to ensure that it can address all reported scenarios of instability. The company aims to roll out the patch by mid-August.
The issue has been linked to a discussion on Steam Community, where a user reported experiencing stability issues with Unreal Engine 4 and 5 games, such as Fortnite and Hogwarts Legacy. The user noticed that the issue seems to affect mostly higher-end models and linked to several Reddit threads with people experiencing the same problem.
More recently, indie studio Alderon Games published a post about encountering significant problems with Intel CPU stability while developing its multiplayer dinosaur survival game Path of Titans. The studio’s founder, Matthew Cassells, reported that the issue affected end customers, dedicated game servers, developers’ computers, game server providers, and even benchmarking tools that use Intel’s 13th and 14th-gen CPUs. Cassells stated that even the CPUs that initially work well deteriorate and eventually fail, based on the company’s observations. “The failure rate we have observed from our own testing is nearly 100 percent,” the studio’s post reads, “indicating it’s only a matter of time before affected CPUs fail.”
