News Intel 13th Gen CPUs allegedly have 4X higher return rate than the prior gen — retailer stats also claim Intel CPU RMAs are higher than AMD

[Admin]

A European retailer reported that Intel processor RMAs have jumped from 1.75% to as much as 7% in recent years.

Intel 13th Gen CPUs allegedly have 4X higher return rate than the prior gen — retailer stats also claim Intel CPU RMAs are higher than AMD : Read more

 

[WDPowell]

"Intel has recently been making rounds in the news with instability with Raptor Lake and Raptor Lake Refresh processors. While the company has announced a mid-August patch to address the crashing and instability problems, the software update won’t repair any chip that has already died or is dying. For example, one of our Intel Core i9-13900K chips refuses to work with Nvidia’s graphics drivers and crashes when some games are launched, and we had to RMA that chip."

I have an Alienware M18R1 that had to get service for a similar issue. Any attempt to launch WoW would initially cause a memory error. Enough attempts would ultimately result in a blue screen followed by a reboot. Once the machine came back up, nothing worked until I manually shut down or rebooted the laptop. For example, browsers would load blank pages and do nothing else. During the troubleshooting process, I tried updating my Nvidia drivers only for the installer to fail to detect the 4090. Once I rebooted the laptop, the installer was able to detect the 4090. I originally thought it was a RAM issue or a faulty motherboard, since the motherboard had been replaced during a previous RMA request. Now I'm suspecting the CPU was failing due to what is being widely reported with the i9 chips.

My concern now is whether my current board/cpu has sustained damage. Fortunately I have a several year warranty on it.

 

[TheHerald]

"Intel has recently been making rounds in the news with instability with Raptor Lake and Raptor Lake Refresh processors. While the company has announced a mid-August patch to address the crashing and instability problems, the software update won’t repair any chip that has already died or is dying. For example, one of our Intel Core i9-13900K chips refuses to work with Nvidia’s graphics drivers and crashes when some games are launched, and we had to RMA that chip."

I have an Alienware M18R1 that had to get service for a similar issue. Any attempt to launch WoW would initially cause a memory error. Enough attempts would ultimately result in a blue screen followed by a reboot. Once the machine came back up, nothing worked until I manually shut down or rebooted the laptop. For example, browsers would load blank pages and do nothing else. During the troubleshooting process, I tried updating my Nvidia drivers only for the installer to fail to detect the 4090. Once I rebooted the laptop, the installer was able to detect the 4090. I originally thought it was a RAM issue or a faulty motherboard, since the motherboard had been replaced during a previous RMA request. Now I'm suspecting the CPU was failing due to what is being widely reported with the i9 chips.

Nah, that isn't a CPU issue.

 

[Taslios]

"Intel has recently been making rounds in the news with instability with Raptor Lake and Raptor Lake Refresh processors. While the company has announced a mid-August patch to address the crashing and instability problems, the software update won’t repair any chip that has already died or is dying. For example, one of our Intel Core i9-13900K chips refuses to work with Nvidia’s graphics drivers and crashes when some games are launched, and we had to RMA that chip."

I have an Alienware M18R1 that had to get service for a similar issue. Any attempt to launch WoW would initially cause a memory error. Enough attempts would ultimately result in a blue screen followed by a reboot. Once the machine came back up, nothing worked until I manually shut down or rebooted the laptop. For example, browsers would load blank pages and do nothing else. During the troubleshooting process, I tried updating my Nvidia drivers only for the installer to fail to detect the 4090. Once I rebooted the laptop, the installer was able to detect the 4090. I originally thought it was a RAM issue or a faulty motherboard, since the motherboard had been replaced during a previous RMA request. Now I'm suspecting the CPU was failing due to what is being widely reported with the i9 chips.

My concern now is whether my current board/cpu has sustained damage. Fortunately I have a several year warranty on it.

... It may not be cpu.. but i'd still open an RMA for it. Your errors sound very similar to the sorts of things that have been reported as being part of the instability.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

"Intel has recently been making rounds in the news with instability with Raptor Lake and Raptor Lake Refresh processors. While the company has announced a mid-August patch to address the crashing and instability problems, the software update won’t repair any chip that has already died or is dying. For example, one of our Intel Core i9-13900K chips refuses to work with Nvidia’s graphics drivers and crashes when some games are launched, and we had to RMA that chip."

I have an Alienware M18R1 that had to get service for a similar issue. Any attempt to launch WoW would initially cause a memory error. Enough attempts would ultimately result in a blue screen followed by a reboot. Once the machine came back up, nothing worked until I manually shut down or rebooted the laptop. For example, browsers would load blank pages and do nothing else. During the troubleshooting process, I tried updating my Nvidia drivers only for the installer to fail to detect the 4090. Once I rebooted the laptop, the installer was able to detect the 4090. I originally thought it was a RAM issue or a faulty motherboard, since the motherboard had been replaced during a previous RMA request. Now I'm suspecting the CPU was failing due to what is being widely reported with the i9 chips.

My concern now is whether my current board/cpu has sustained damage. Fortunately I have a several year warranty on it.

FYI, in my case, there were initially instability issues with shader compilation in certain games, as well as in CPU stress tests like Cinebench multi-threaded. I was able to work around those to some extent, and eventually found BIOS settings that appeared to work. That was in ~February. I started retesting all GPUs. But by May I found that I couldn't update my Nvidia drivers — the GPU was detected fine, but the installer would just fail.

At this point, I tried a different motherboard, RAM, updated BIOS settings, and even did a fresh install of Windows 11. That last actually crashed a couple of times after the initial file copy, meaning during the "detecting devices, etc" stage of the install it crashed. It was able to recover and eventually get Windows 11 up and running, but I couldn't install Nvidia drivers and some other apps were also unstable. That's when I RMA'ed the CPU.

 

[WDPowell]

... It may not be cpu.. but i'd still open an RMA for it. Your errors sound very similar to the sorts of things that have been reported as being part of the instability.

It's been RMAed and the board had been replaced. This particular board was itself an RMA replacement, which I suspect was a refurbished board. We were able to rule out RAM since Dell did send a technician out to replace my RAM. Unfortunately the issues persisted. It could have been a GPU issue, but I found it interesting that my CPU was an i9 and some of the symptoms matched what the article mentioned. This issue was something that seemed to develop over time. When I got the laptop back, from the first RMA, I was able to game on it just fine. I took an extended break from said game then couldn't launch it anymore when I tried picking it back up.

 

[magbarn]

Intel needs to do a FDIV type of recall on these chips or at the very least double the warranty to 6 years to rebuild confidence. I've lowered the power limit and voltages on my 13900K and seems to be stable now, but I'm not doing RMA as long as it's stable and the "fix" hasn't been fully tested in the wild.

 

[Charizor234]

Intel needs to do a FDIV type of recall on these chips or at the very least double the warranty to 6 years to rebuild confidence. I've lowered the power limit and voltages on my 13900K and seems to be stable now, but I'm not doing RMA as long as it's stable and the "fix" hasn't been fully tested in the wild.

I'm in the process of RMA-ing my 14700KF right now. I'm just hoping it didn't mess up my board because it's been faulty and running way too hot for over 6 months now. It won't function at the recommended voltage but works if it's run at a higher voltage even then though, it overheats instantly.

 

[Zerk2012]

Part of the article just doesn't look right.

"with some institutions reportedly jumping to AMD’s Ryzen 9000 CPUs.

AMD has been having some issues on its side as well, with the launch of the Ryzen 9000 chips pushed back a couple of weeks due to an unspecified issue"

How can you be jumping to something that's not released yet?
Why would you be planing now to buy something that is already having problems without knowing it will be fixed properly?

 

[Geekaycee]

This is just a start.

 

[greymaterial]

I have an Alienware M18R1 that had to get service for a similar issue.

is your cpu i9-13900HX? this cpu has the same B0 die as 13900K/KS/KF, the same desktop chip used in mobile configuration. did you use AWCC "performance" mode or OC? those would accelerate the issue as well.

 

[WDPowell]

is your cpu i9-13900HX? this cpu has the same B0 die as 13900K/KS/KF, the same desktop chip used in mobile configuration. did you use AWCC "performance" mode or OC? those would accelerate the issue as well.

I think I had it in performance mode while gaming.

 

[greymaterial]

I think I had it in performance mode while gaming.

from what I see with my g-series 7630, the awcc performance mode would oc the cpu to 5.5GHz on two best binned p-cores and 5.3 on the rest, apart from the fan curve tuning. I only used the g button to max the fan speed as that one is without oc; manually i down tune the freq and power with XTU as well. see if you can tune down with XTU for stability as well, i do so just preventatively.

 

[Taslios]

It's been RMAed and the board had been replaced. This particular board was itself an RMA replacement, which I suspect was a refurbished board. We were able to rule out RAM since Dell did send a technician out to replace my RAM. Unfortunately the issues persisted. It could have been a GPU issue, but I found it interesting that my CPU was an i9 and some of the symptoms matched what the article mentioned. This issue was something that seemed to develop over time. When I got the laptop back, from the first RMA, I was able to game on it just fine. I took an extended break from said game then couldn't launch it anymore when I tried picking it back up.

I mean RMA the CPU with Intel. this sounds exactly what others have experienced as a CPU error... so very very flustering as the CPU is always the last thing and this really seems to be a memory/PCIe,/GPU issue when it is not.

 

[Taslios]

Part of the article just doesn't look right.

"with some institutions reportedly jumping to AMD’s Ryzen 9000 CPUs.

AMD has been having some issues on its side as well, with the launch of the Ryzen 9000 chips pushed back a couple of weeks due to an unspecified issue"

How can you be jumping to something that's not released yet?
Why would you be planing now to buy something that is already having problems without knowing it will be fixed properly?

Several Companies have said all "Future" replacements will be AMD 9000 series.