News Intel announces an extra two years of warranty for its chips amid crashing and instability issues — longer warranty applies to 13th- and 14th-Gen C...

[Admin]

Intel announced today that it will extend the warranty on its boxed Intel Core 13th- and 14th-Gen processors by two additional years.

Intel announces an extra two years of warranty for its chips amid crashing and instability issues — longer warranty applies to 13th- and 14th-Gen C... : Read more

 

[rtoaht]

That’s good news.

 

[vinay2070]

Thats good news, but they need to honor it. They were already rejecting the RMAs with existing warranties.
And how does this applied to laptops, would laptop manufacturer give you 4 years CPU warranty? Who decides where the problem lies in a laptop as the chip is soldered? At this point its wise to stay away from Intel, A CPU should definitely last 5+ years.

 

[kjfatl]

Thats good news, but they need to honor it. They were already rejecting the RMAs with existing warranties.
And how does this applied to laptops, would laptop manufacturer give you 4 years CPU warranty? Who decides where the problem lies in a laptop as the chip is soldered? At this point its wise to stay away from Intel, A CPU should definitely last 5+ years.

Does Intel sell "retail boxed CPUs" in BGA packages? The solution for these customers will involve the PC manufacturer.

 

[Thunder64]

Thats good news, but they need to honor it. They were already rejecting the RMAs with existing warranties.
And how does this applied to laptops, would laptop manufacturer give you 4 years CPU warranty? Who decides where the problem lies in a laptop as the chip is soldered? At this point its wise to stay away from Intel, A CPU should definitely last 5+ years.

That's what most are suggesting at the moment. Not Tom's though. They just published an article on July 28th where they give Intel the win for "Best CPU's of 2024".

This was pretty much a necessary move on Intel's part but I don't think it will be enough to win back much goodwill.

 

[sjkpublic]

Its NOT good news. It means there was a serious failure on Intel's part. Microcode changes may fix the issue. Or a completely new chip. Where is the warranty for the time and labor to fix this mess? BIG LAWSUIT COMING.

 

[ikjadoon]

Wow. So it's really that bad. Intel 13th & 14th gen are now infamous CPUs; people are going to remember this for a long time.

Good that Intel is finally doing it, but this should've been Intel's stance on Day 1. I must imagine that AMD, Apple, Qualcomm, Arm, etc.—at least financially—are feeling a little giddy tonight.

Can't wait to see the mini-documentary on this in 10 years.

 

[thestryker]

And how does this applied to laptops, would laptop manufacturer give you 4 years CPU warranty? Who decides where the problem lies in a laptop as the chip is soldered? At this point its wise to stay away from Intel, A CPU should definitely last 5+ years.

Laptop CPUs, according to Intel, are not affected by the problem that is impacting the 65W+ base power desktop CPUs.

Its NOT good news.

Not necessarily as it just means the bad press was getting bad enough they felt the need to do something material. Depending on what the trigger for the degradation is it may not really cost them anything for those extra two years (keep in mind the 13900K launched in October 2022 with a 3 year warranty for boxed CPUs so the oldest are still under warranty for at least another 14 months).

 

[LolaGT]

Expected.
There was never going to be a recall. They will RMA on a case by case basis until the warranty periods run out.
Any other solution would be throwing many, many millions away on what is mostly perfectly good silicon.

 

[A Stoner]

The right thing to do, but comes far too late. The company can recover, but it will be painful before it does.

I used to be a huge Intel fan, I had not owned anything not intel all the way back to the i486DX2 days until I got the AMD 7950X3D I currently have.

Intel price/performance and power/performance metrics just simply were not favorable anymore, and stuff like this just makes the decision I made feel even better.

Intel needs to get their power issues under control while delivering leading edge performance to lure me back. I have 3 PCs running in my home computer room, and I just cannot deal with the heat output of intel CPUs. Nothing I can do about the graphics cards, nVidia just simply cannot be replaced at the top tier.

 

[CelicaGT]

That's what most are suggesting at the moment. Not Tom's though. They just published an article on July 28th where they give Intel the win for "Best CPU's of 2024".

This was pretty much a necessary move on Intel's part but I don't think it will be enough to win back much goodwill.

Any "Best of" article on any Future PLC website is best ignored. As much as I'd like site like Tom's and others to better maintain journalistic freedom they have to post veiled advertisements like that. Other sites, like Ars Technica do a bit better job by offering paid subscriptions as well as....mmmnn somewhat unobtrusive ads (I subscribe). They also post notifications when their parent company (Conde Nast) is the subject of, directly, or indirectly, of an article, as well they should. Different markets though, Ars appeals to a much larger audience than Tom's Hardware so paid subs can make up the difference.

(edit: clarity)

 

[jlake3]

Where is the warranty for the time and labor to fix this mess? BIG LAWSUIT COMING.

For boxed processors? Intel isn't going to pay you for the time it takes to swap your CPU and for loss of uptime. That's not part of the warranty you get with boxed retail CPUs.

As for OEMs and system integrators that are buying by the tray, I used to work in a supply chain where my company supplied raw castings to another company that would machine them and sell them on. We had an agreement where below a certain reject rate they would just return the parts for investigation and get replacements, but if the reject rate went above that we'd owe a penalty for the lost throughput. I'd assume there's a similar agreement between OEMs and Intel, where the OEMs bear the labor cost of warranty work in return for cheaper OEM prices up to some point, but Intel owes some kind of rebate/discount on future orders if the warranty rate climbs into atypical territory.

 

[Hotrod2go]

This doesn't matter to over clockers, as noted on the Intel site...
"Altering clock frequency or voltage may void any product warranties and reduce stability, security, performance, and life of the processor and other components. Check with system and component manufacturers for details."
Only normies that put up with out of the box configurations is this news relevant too.

 

[TheHerald]

A CPU should definitely last 5+ years.

That's what someone would think, but considering both manafacturers only offer a 3 year warranty (well, now intel 5) clearly it's not the case, right?

 

[TheHerald]

This doesn't matter to over clockers, as noted on the Intel site...
"Altering clock frequency or voltage may void any product warranties and reduce stability, security, performance, and life of the processor and other components. Check with system and component manufacturers for details."
Only normies that put up with out of the box configurations is this news relevant too.

Uhm, well, obviously? Yes Intel (and amd) can deny warranty if you manually push 1.75 volts to your CPU and fry it. How would they know though is a better question

 

[LolaGT]

Been on my mind since the start of this fiasco. Those so-called normies should not have been getting anywhere near i9k/ks CPUs and dropping them into enthusiast MBs hitting the power switch and walking away.
They were never the intended market, intel has always inferred whether written or otherwise, that they were for people who knew their way around a modern bios and also would know what would be bad long term, like giving the preferred cores all the beans, and running them on cooling not up to that level of heat removal.

This doesn't matter to over clockers, as noted on the Intel site...
"Altering clock frequency or voltage may void any product warranties and reduce stability, security, performance, and life of the processor and other components. Check with system and component manufacturers for details."
Only normies that put up with out of the box configurations is this news relevant too.

 

[CelicaGT]

Uhm, well, obviously? Yes Intel (and amd) can deny warranty if you manually push 1.75 volts to your CPU and fry it. How would they know though is a better question

The symptoms of overclocking being strikingly similar to the symptoms of the failing CPU's in question....they'd better just process the RMA and stop talking. Intel and AMD both have a long history of honouring warranties on even admittedly overclocked chips (PCWorld had an article on this iirc). This is either just good faith, or they cannot tell/did not care. Who knows? Either way, I'm pretty sure Intel knows they've stepped in it now, I don't expect many people to have any issues with the RMA process anymore.

 

[Hotrod2go]

Uhm, well, obviously? Yes Intel (and amd) can deny warranty if you manually push 1.75 volts to your CPU and fry it. How would they know though is a better question

Do you know every single piece of part of that silicon & exactly what it does & does not do precisely?
They have ways of knowing.

 

[YSCCC]

Been on my mind since the start of this fiasco. Those so-called normies should not have been getting anywhere near i9k/ks CPUs and dropping them into enthusiast MBs hitting the power switch and walking away.
They were never the intended market, intel has always inferred whether written or otherwise, that they were for people who knew their way around a modern bios and also would know what would be bad long term, like giving the preferred cores all the beans, and running them on cooling not up to that level of heat removal.

Yes, they are not for those who drop in and don't do tweaking, BUT that is only supposed to be the case when the drop in default settings are SAFE to begin with, you can't have your own VID table built in which is essentially a mini-spec certified by Intel for safe operation to be harmful to the CPU to begin with and expect every buyer could bring it back down manually... We know that if default is 1.4V we should not pump like 30% extra and expect it to work flawless for a decade, but not that the chip will die/degrade with good cooling and stock settings....

The symptoms of overclocking being strikingly similar to the symptoms of the failing CPU's in question....they'd better just process the RMA and stop talking. Intel and AMD both have a long history of honouring warranties on even admittedly overclocked chips (PCWorld had an article on this iirc). This is either just good faith, or they cannot tell/did not care. Who knows? Either way, I'm pretty sure Intel knows they've stepped in it now, I don't expect many people to have any issues with the RMA process anymore.

This exactly is what most denied RMA requests comes from, not to say that a faulty microcode and let all those reviews and default bios essentially let the chip runs at OC till smoking profile will kill the replacement chip soon if your first chip fries within say, 3 months, usually it's that second RMA will get denied and gone is your $600. Personally for my Z690 platform I have experienced no CPU death (yet) but experienced bad DRAM from gskill due to the chip shortage and I bought 2x32kits, back then 2 packs of 1.25V DDR5 5600 CL30 just plain got unstable within 1 month and need RMA, gskill dealer here basically just go memtest for 15min and once any error is found, instant replacement without question, on my third RMA they compensated for $10 extra for a pack of DDR5 6000 CL32 for replacement which I since ran strong for 1 year now. Even good RMA is frustrating, not to say we have to wait and see if the RMA denied threads pops out left and right after the hot grilling of bad press stopped

 

[bit_user]

That's what most are suggesting at the moment. Not Tom's though. They just published an article on July 28th where they give Intel the win for "Best CPU's of 2024".

Thanks for pointing this out. The same can be said for their Best CPU for Gaming in 2024 article.

Both articles have a paragraph, near the beginning, cautioning about Intel CPUs. However, probably 90% of readers will just skip down to the actual recommendations, and the editor didn't bother to list degradation or the possible performance impact of the microcode update as a Con, on any of the three Raptor Lake (B0) K-series CPUs included in the recommendations.

Sadly, the comments of that article have been disabled for the past 5 years. They just keep updating the same article and nobody bothers either to unlock the comment thread or create a new one for it.

 

[Flayed]

I think this warranty extension is the bare minimum Intel could have done.

 

[bit_user]

Do you know every single piece of part of that silicon & exactly what it does & does not do precisely?
They have ways of knowing.

Yeah, I seem to recall reading that the CPU burns some fuse or something, if it's ever overclocked. Intel explicitly says overclocking voids the warranty, so you'd expect them to embed a mechanism so they could tell if it happened.

Something like undervolting is probably a different story, though.

 

[bit_user]

Those so-called normies should not have been getting anywhere near i9k/ks CPUs and dropping them into enthusiast MBs hitting the power switch and walking away.

The problem with this logic is that Intel reserves the fastest clock speeds for their K-series CPUs. If K-series had exactly the same specs as non-K, but just differed in the fact that they're unlocked, you'd have a good point.

They were never the intended market, intel has always inferred implied whether written or otherwise, that they were for people who knew their way around a modern bios and also would know what would be bad long term

Nowhere do they say that "normies" shouldn't buy them.

Someone who is innocently just trying to build an Intel PC with the best specs will naturally end up using a K-series CPU, even without any intention or inclination to overclock or otherwise tweak it.

 

[slightnitpick]

The symptoms of overclocking being strikingly similar to the symptoms of the failing CPU's in question....they'd better just process the RMA and stop talking. Intel and AMD both have a long history of honouring warranties on even admittedly overclocked chips (PCWorld had an article on this iirc).

If Intel does this for these chips, how many people do you expect will purposefully fry their CPU trying to see how high/fast/hot they can get it and then send it in for a replacement?

 

[YSCCC]

If Intel does this for these chips, how many people do you expect will purposefully fry their CPU trying to see how high/fast/hot they can get it and then send it in for a replacement?

I bet it will be very few, even the same model, geeks who knows how to fry it will know that there is what called silicone lottery, if one gets a ok chip it's more than likely the replacement will run stock slower than the original, not to say given the current state the i9s are literally pushing at the verge of breaking, getting the golden sample vs the bare minimum sample within the safe limit would likely have <5% practical difference, with the newer gen offerings coming around those benchmark chasers will need to use the latest chips anyway, for those who "settle" with the older gen TOTL model more than likely just want a stable platform to work/game, not frying it to the max and wait and get 3% faster and 2 months later the CPU just cooked and you have to do all those replacement process again losing a few days of production in between, not to say for RPL higher end models, it need good cooling, so also good thermal paste is needed, changing that much paste just to have fun will likely not be what a lot of user's wanted