News Game publisher claims 100% crash rate with Intel CPUs – Alderon Games says company sells defective 13th and 14th gen chips

[helper800]

After literally ordering an i9-14900KF yesterday and receiving it today along with a GIGABYTE Z790 AORUS PRO X, I am absolutely horrified. Afraid to put together the build.

Despite being a shameless Intel fanboy for over 15 years, I'm thinking I should I return both and buy a Ryzen 9 7950X3D.

...Though another part of me wants to press my luck and hope I received some good quality silicon.

Ugh.

Just set a reasonable power limit in BIOS and cross your fingers. If not, then I would get a 7600 and wait for the new Ryzen CPUs to release. Or just wait with no PC until the new ryzen stuff. The next Intel release wont be until late this year most likely.

 

[helper800]

100%? Yeah okay, sure bud.

Here is the exact quote:

Alderon Games revealed that it had observed a nearly 100% failure rate of Raptor Lake processors in its own testing.

Its not impossible that their specific game hits this issue in such a specific way that they reach 90%+ "failure rate." They could also be defining failure as having just a little instability. We dont know their testing criteria so all anyone could do is take what they say with a grain of salt. All I know for a fact is that there is "some," sort of issue people are experiencing with core i7 and i9 CPUs from Raptorlake.

 

[TheHerald]

Here is the exact quote:

Couple that with their other gem "Ryzen have a 100x lower failure rate"" and I would take everything they say with a big grain of salt. They are just riding the publicity wave with nonsense.

 

[bit_user]

Its not impossible that their specific game hits this issue in such s specific way that they reach 90%+ "failure rate."

I interpreted what they said to mean that, at some point or another, every Raptor Lake CPU they've tried will eventually encounter at least one error of a sort they attribute to the hardware. That's not saying the error rate is bad enough to consider the CPU unusable.

 

[bit_user]

Even if it isnt their likely going to lose a bunch of future customers who deal with this issue to amd

Their solution to that will be bribing a bunch of influencers and hiring (more?) social media trolls to plug their products and trash AMD.

Note: If we had anyone like that in these forums, you would not be allowed to name them.

 

[helper800]

Couple that with their other gem "Ryzen have a 100x lower failure rate"" and I would take everything they say with a big grain of salt. They are just riding the publicity wave with nonsense.

Well since we do not have the numbers it would be impossible to know what they even mean when they say this, right? I also believe that both circumstances could be true, can you? Feasibly they could be riding the publicity AND having issues described in the article, right?

 

[phitinh81]

The Pentium FDIV bug (if that's what you're referring to) affected 100% of CPUs with the affected model & steppings. If you were doing any kind of financial, scientific, or engineering work, you'd definitely have been affected by it, to some degree. That made it a different class of bug.

Well this one is more complicated than FDIV. Its an outright hardware defect causing exponential silicon degradation. Its just not 100% reproducible unlike FDIV. Or maybe it is providing enough time.

 

[35below0]

If I recall correctly, these are i9s only, right? The 14700K and non-K series were unaffected?

i9 and i7 are affected. i5 and i3 are not. Also 12th gen is unaffected, somehow.

 

[helper800]

Well this one is more complicated than FDIV. Its an outright hardware defect causing exponential silicon degradation. Its just not 100% reproducible unlike FDIV. Or maybe it is providing enough time.

To me it seems like some sort of silicon quality issue, or the processing done on the wafers, otherwise how could they be poring over the architecture so much that they find irrelevant bugs but not the source of this issue? I do not know. My understandings of these types of issues do not go deep enough to give a satisfactory supposition.

 

[helper800]

i9 and i7 are affected. i5 and i3 are not. Also 12th gen is unaffected, somehow.

Yeah, many have speculated that the issue is architectural, but then again I don't understand how they have not found it already if that were the case. See my above post.

 

[35below0]

Yeah, many have speculated that the issue is architectural, but then again I don't understand how they have not found it already if that were the case. See my above post.

The reason i'm surprised is that the 12th gen introduced this hybrid structure AND also opened the floodgates to unstable overclocking. It begins with the 12th gen and 600 series chipsets. And yet those are unaffected.

But then the 13th gen improved performance considerably. So maybe somewhere things got out of hand.
Both the i5 13600K and i17 13700K outperform the i9 12900K, the 13700K by quite some margin.
And yet the 13600K does not suffer from any crashes, while the 13700K does.

The motherboards were to blame as we learned, but even with that a 13600K or 14600K will not get into the same trouble the i7 and i9 CPUs from the 13/14th generation will.

 

[derekullo]

I guess I got "lucky" buying my i9-12900k during the crypto wars for some crazy price.
Had I waited I'd have a 13th or 14th gen i9!

 

[bit_user]

But then the 13th gen improved performance considerably. So maybe somewhere things got out of hand.

Gen 13 & 14 used a modified process node. That's the main way they were able to achieve higher boost clocks.

​

It could be that they pushed the VF curve too hard, or maybe something else about the process node tweaks are causing accelerated silicon aging.

 

[tamalero]

From listening to the Level1Tech interview on Gamer's Nexus is that the servers would be fine at first and then after 3-4 months have failures. Figure if these are running 24/7 then 3-4 months for them is 9 months or longer if you game 8hrs a day every day. Less usage means it will take longer to happen in theory.

Still frightening how fast that degradation was.
Makes you wonder if intel is playing the "We dunno lol" to keep things slow and when the general public finally gets fully affected... they would be "old news, it wasnt us".

 

[Allen_B]

Know who else (besides gamers) uses a bunch of Intel i9’s? Electronic traders. It should be interesting to see if and how these issues affect that use case.

 

[slightnitpick]

In this case, I'm going to blame the game studio, simply because they let somebody say "100 times fewer" in a press release.
If they company's leadership can't express basic math correctly in clear English syntax, then its easy to imagine their coders are getting confused and making mistakes.

What's not clear about the referred to statement? Native US English speaker and writer here and I believe I understood it as intended.

 

[danwat1234]

The degradation over time sounds absurd to me given that all temperature data that Level1techs observed in the logs was mid 80s max on W series mobos. There should be virtually no degradation even after 5+ years 24/7 full load. Unless heat spreader causing hot spot on die not detected by a sensor? It will be most interesting what it turns out to be. Turn down the clocks, disable e-cores, can still happen. Downclock the DDR5, possible fix, .. but lower binned chips often/usually use the same silicon (memory controller) as the high-end which has this problem, just disabled components.

 

[rluker5]

I have a problem free 13900kf that isn't quite as fast as a 14900k or 14900ks.
I'm also apparently fairly good at tuning, so I was looking on Ebay for some unstable chip deals.
None to be found, not even that many 14900xx for sale.
I've got some real good deals on problematic GPUs that I got going, where are the i9 deals?
I must not be fast enough. If Intel isn't taking a significant number of RMAs they must be out there.
Also how about those CPUs that the owners know are degrading because they used to be 6ghz all core stable but are now just 5.7ghz all core stable because of the constant 1.5v, I would take one of those for ~$375.

 

[Amdlova]

How these cpu die quickly? C0 C1 C7 how many times per second they change the power state?
My 13600t 13500t can core temp change from 28 °c to 70°c on milliseconds... and is rated to 92w turbo. Now think the i9 counterpart they hit the 99°c or more before the sensor can show something.

The I9 problem is trying to put the sun on a little spot.

 

[Notton]

The degradation over time sounds absurd to me given that all temperature data that Level1techs observed in the logs was mid 80s max on W series mobos. There should be virtually no degradation even after 5+ years 24/7 full load. Unless heat spreader causing hot spot on die not detected by a sensor? It will be most interesting what it turns out to be. Turn down the clocks, disable e-cores, can still happen. Downclock the DDR5, possible fix, .. but lower binned chips often/usually use the same silicon (memory controller) as the high-end which has this problem, just disabled components.

1. Electromigration degredation is accelerated by heat, but happens even at lower temperatures, if the voltages are higher.
2. It's not absurd when there is a a manufacturing or design defect. That's why it's a defect...

 

[jeremyj_83]

Downclock the DDR5

In a video Wendall said they had the RAM clocked at 4200MHz or 4800MHz, I don't remember which, and the failures still happened. Not to mention they limited the max CPU clock to 5.3GHz.

 

[btmedic04]

After literally ordering an i9-14900KF yesterday and receiving it today along with a GIGABYTE Z790 AORUS PRO X, I am absolutely horrified. Afraid to put together the build.

Despite being a shameless Intel fanboy for over 15 years, I'm thinking I should I return both and buy a Ryzen 9 7950X3D.

...Though another part of me wants to press my luck and hope I received some good quality silicon.

Ugh.

I have both the 7800x3d and the 7950x3d and can honestly say that if you are just gaming, go for the 7800x3d. you get the same gaming performance for less money and dont have to set up the drivers or xbox game bar compared to the 7950x3d.

 

[TheHerald]

What's not clear about the referred to statement? Native US English speaker and writer here and I believe I understood it as intended.

100x fewer isn't a thing. It's for kids to use , not for adults. The proper mathematically sound syntax is 1/100th, not 100x fewer.

 

[helper800]

100x fewer isn't a thing. It's for kids to use , not for adults. The proper mathematically sound syntax is 1/100th, not 100x fewer.

Mathematically they are both equivalent. 100x fewer is the reciprocal of the multiplication of 100x, which is 1/100th. There is no room for debate here.

 

[TheHerald]

Mathematically they are both equivalent. 100x fewer is the reciprocal of the multiplication of 100x, which is 1/100th. There is no room for debate here.

No it is not. 100x times fewer takes you into negative numbers. If you take it at face value, if Intel crashes 100 times, 100x fewer takes you into -9900 crashes for amd.

That coming from a developer, you know - people writing code - just yikes.