Question Some Gigabyte Z790 motherboards are facing a rare issue where it just randomly reboots after applying the Intel microcode patch (the 0x129 version) ?

p1xel8or

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Aug 31, 2023
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It has been a nightmare the past few days. My PC would just randomly go black and reboot. Event Viewer always showed it as "Event ID 41 - Kernel Power". I've tested my memory, PSU and CPU and everything was fine. I even clean installed Windows to no avail. I scoured the internet for a fix until I came across various threads on the GIGABYTE subreddit around a month ago mentioning this exact same issue:

Thread 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/gigabyte/c...ated_my_gigabyte_z790_gaming_x_ax_11_bios_to/
Thread 2: https://www.reddit.com/r/gigabyte/comments/1er12gz/gigabyte_z790_x_ax_suddenly_shutdown_and_restart/
Thread 3: https://www.reddit.com/r/gigabyte/c...find_a_solution_to_random_reboots_at/lp02f44/
Thread 4: https://www.reddit.com/r/gigabyte/c...gigabyte_z790_gaming_x_ax_11_bios_to/lolvfl2/
Thread 5: https://www.reddit.com/r/gigabyte/c...find_a_solution_to_random_reboots_at/lmiwwcr/

The mentioned fix was to go back to the previous version of the BIOS - in this case I had to downgrade from F11e (I have a Z790 UD AX, rev 1.0) to F10, and sure enough my PC has not rebooted after 6 hours of continuous usage, previously it would crash a couple times in the span of 2-3 hours. Only downside is I am pretty nervous of launching any Unreal Engine game or just any game in general in case my CPU starts degrading (has been good so far).

Has anyone else been facing this issue? And what could be causing this?

PC Specs just in case:

Motherboard: GIGABYTE Z790 UD AX
CPU: i9-13900K
GPU: RTX 4090
RAM: 32GB RAM
Storage: 500GB SSD/1TB SSD/4TB HDD
PSU: EVGA 1300 GT 80 GOLD

Regards.
 
No I did not overclock. I'm very tech illiterate, so I do not mess around with overclocking/undervolting in fear of breaking something. I already RMA'd the CPU previously and got a new one which has been running fine for a year. Purchased PC on April 2023, CPU started failing in July when running shader compilations in Unreal Engine games. RMA'd it , got the replacement in a week and it has been running fine ever since. I just ran another shader compilation (Mortal Kombat 1 to be precise) and it worked, if the CPU is degrading it should crash and give me an "out of video memory" error right? That's what my old CPU did.