Intel's CPUs Are Failing, ft. Wendell of Level1 Techs

WATCH WENDELL'S VIDEO! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzHcrbT5D_Y We're also working with Wendell to explore the tip we got recently. Will take some time though as it requires getting failed samples in from people. If you've had one, email us!

Former Intel employee here. I resigned from a firmware team almost exactly two years ago due to the highly toxic internal culture. I know from firsthand experience that those who don't "go with the flow" tend to get systematically suppressed. I've watched Intel since then, and I can't say I'm surprised by any of this. In fact, I predicted that they were pushing their silicon too hard since the release of 13th gen and that they were likely pushing their margins too hard and wondered whether we would see premature hardware degradation. Here we are a few months after release, and we are seeing what is likely a result of degradation.

Someone sneezed in the clean room. 😂😅

Reminds me of when my late friend Dr. Kip W4KIP found the Pentium error. He tried to call Intel and tell them. They thought he was crazy. 3 months later, the poop hit the fan; they called him back and wanted details. I think their heads are in the sand again.

It's freaking cruel for people who buys top of the line CPUs, spend some money for extra performance and get screwed by the companies for being the most excited customers. I remember going top-dollar (for the time) to buy a 3930k on a X79 platform at the time (one of the first hexacores CPUs at the time), and the platform being extremely unstable for a long time until I had 2 different BIOS updates. Intel CPU on Intel motherboard. Never again, now I stay at least 1 step below the top-notch, everything just works out of the box better.

Buying a used cpu in this lineup is going to be horrible situation, noones going to be touching that with ten foot pole

A little disappointed Wendell wasn't summoned out of a portal. :_gnexusLaserEyes:

After 8 months two days ago I finally got my new i9-13900kf. I was having a slew of BSOD, random shut offs, and game crashes. It started with CS2 crashing, and then from there over the course of 6 months it got worse and worse until the last month of my RMA process when it would BSOD/ turn off 10+ times a day. Absolutely absurd support timeframe. And they completely neglected to reassure me that the issue wouldn't persist.

Steve, mate, I am really 12 hours away from making a 45 mile trip to the nearest Micro Center to get parts for a new PC (my trusty 4790k build from 2016 finally died) all set and researched list to buy the 13900K and you convinced me to scrap it all and go with a 7900X3D build instead, thank you for your investigative journalism!

I've said it before, but it feels like Intel's been taking an old, 4 cylinder turbo ICE and just gradually cranking up the PSI on the turbo year after year hoping the engine holds.

Chips then: Work for 15 years without any traces of degradation. Still support factory clocks and overclocking today.

Intel engineer horror movie - "I know what you developed last summer"

"1 error a week on a non over-clocked configuration is not than bad" The amount of errors I expect to see from my CPU per week, per month or per year is 0 (zero). That's exactly the amount of errors I have seen from my cpus in the past. If I have a single CPU error, I would expect it is either old or dying, or the game is doing something iffy. When a see a second error, I would immediately conclude that the CPU is broken and I need a new one. Guess I will not look at intel cpus for a few more years.

Randomly posted this video in our work chat. One of our developers has been stumped trying to fix this and didn't know it was related to processor. THANK YOU

I work at a high volume PC repair shop where we deal with a lot of gaming PCs. We typically have between 3-5 13900k or 14900k systems per week that come in with really odd behavior. Typically games either fail to launch or crash shortly into a game among other things. When running OCCT during a CPU stress test, the CPU almost always fails. Switching to a test 13700k completely eliminates all issues. I am not sure why the failure is happening after just a few months of ownership of the CPU. But my theory is that the CPU is "cooking" itself. Whenever we find the CPU has failed testing, we tell the customer to either switch to a 14700k which seems more stable or to swap to an AMD CPU.

just gave up on my 14900k and built 7950x3d system, will RMA it and sell on eBay unopened to anyone willing to try their luck. Even on stock it would crash, 8 months of pain, and I work in game dev. remotely.... last 4 months the bloody browser tabs started crashing due to CPU errors, that was last straw. Have been on Ryzen 9 7950x3d for 5 days now and loving it.

Intel: this is fine...

im a linux user with a high-end 14th gen intel cpu who's experienced almost all of the issues described in this video, in both gaming and heavy code compilation contexts. learning that it's not just me is very validating for me many hours of attempting to fix it.

Thanks Chuckles!

Once you let the creatures with marketers' souls touch anything, it's on the road to hell.