Intel has a serious problem. It's about the stability of the processors
Recently, there have been more and more reports from users regarding problems with 13th and 14th generation Intel Core processors. It's about the lack of stability in new games.
Intel has long been the king of the computer processor market. Both when talking about home users and server solutions. As many as 68% of players choose CPUs from Blue. Reason? Top performance in games and programs and support for the latest technologies, often long before AMD.
Intel confirms the situation and is already investigating the matter
However, it seems that Intel may have a tough nut to crack. There are numerous reports from South Korea about stability problems with 13th and 14th generation Intel Core processors, also known as Intel Raptor Lake and Raptor Lake Refresh. The situation mainly concerns games.
Most often, Koreans encounter a failure and a message “Out of Video Memory” which seemingly suggests a problem with the graphics card. However, it is about compiling shaders on the processor. It seems that this mainly applies to games powered by Unreal Enginesuch as Hogwarts Legacy, Lies of P, Remnant 2 and many others.
The situation is seriousand some sources say that “up to 10 people a day return Intel processors to stores in Korea”. However, this number seems absurdly high and unrealistic. In an interview with the Korean editorial office of ZDNET Intel has confirmed that the issue does exist and the issue is being actively investigated.
Until there is an official explanation, only guesses remain. One of the more likely versions is… the motherboard manufacturers' fault. Almost all major companies – ASUS, ASRock, GIGABYTE and MSI – serve by default very high voltages and bypass power limits imposed by Intel. This in turn affects power consumption, stability and temperatures, all in order to perform 1-3% better than the competition's platform.
We already emphasized this in our Intel Raptor Lake Refresh tests (1, 2, 3). This version seems to be confirmed by consumers – manually lowering the voltage often solves the problem. And people who from the very beginning decided on the so-called undervolting never reported such failures.
