Back in April of this year, I investigated reports of crashing pouring in from Intel Core i9-14900K owners who had said they were experiencing crashes and blue screens of death in multiple applications on multiple computers. I had been investigating for a few months and was able to confirm that it was a problem that Intel was working on and identifying. Games like Tekken 8 drew additional attention to the problem, but users were reporting problems with other games and software, too.

From what I had identified at the time, the problem was affecting many different programs. I personally experienced it with Davinci Resolve where videos would fail to render, Escape from Tarkov where I was experiencing Unity-related crashes, and I experienced it in Counter-Strike where my computer would blue screen when I loaded a map with an anti-cheat enabled.

Once I started experiencing the latter example, I began to chase up leads to try and get to the bottom of the problem. This was how I discovered it was a problem with my Intel Core i9-14900K, and that it was also happening on my second unit as well. We identified a fix at the time that worked consistently across machines, but since the original publishing of this article (April 11th, 2024), more information has come to light.

For now, we recommend installing the latest BIOS updates for your motherboard if you are using an Intel 13th Gen or 14th Gen CPU, but that may not be enough to fix the problem. Intel says that it has a microcode update coming out this month for affected CPUs, and affected CPUs are also getting an additional two years added to their warranty.

The Intel Core i9-14900K almost certainly has a problem

I first experienced it with anti-cheat software

Counter-Strike 2 running on the Lenovo G27q-30

Way back in January, I was trying to find out what the cause of my crashing problems were. The crashing in Counter-Strike was particularly frustrating, as it's my most-played game. I eventually narrowed down the problem to when I was using a third-party anti-cheat, Faceit, and I reached out to the company with my log files in order to diagnose the problem. Their anti-cheat team responded to me, saying that one other user was having the same problem as me with the same CPU and that they believed it to be a CPU bug.

The FACEIT anti-cheat team saying that it's a CPU bug that caused problems

Another friend of mine who actively uses the platform experienced the same problems with his Intel Core i9-13900K, though a motherboard replacement seemed to solve the problem for him. At this point, I began to connect the dots. Faceit told me they had also seen users with the 13900K experience the same problem, and doing some research, I actually found some users on the Intel forums with the same CPU complaining last year of unexplained crashes in games.

To make matters worse, I later found out another friend of mine experienced the same crashes with a 13900K, and even installing the latest BIOS updates and using Intel Default Settings didn't fix it. As it turns out, Tom's Hardware reports, according to sources at Intel, that the damage incurred by these CPUs is permanent. This checks out, as my friend's CPU appeared to be so severely damaged that he was still crashing even when using Intel Default Settings.

For the technical explanation, this is what Faceit said to me when I sent them the crash dumps from Counter-Strike:

The crash dumps just don't make much sense, it shows an access violation reading a specific address, the address that the current instruction is reading from is perfectly readable in the dump and different from what the exception is showing.

Intel has been investigating

I reached out to Intel

Holding the Intel Core i9-14900KS

Once I had the findings from Faceit, I reached out to Intel with those log files, what I was told, and what my experience had been. An investigation internally at Intel followed, which has clearly been ongoing for several months. At the time, I was told that Intel was investigating the cause as being related to motherboards operating out of specification with the Intel Core i9-14900K, though it appeared that that wasn't the whole reason and that something in the production process of the CPU may be the cause. Intel said the primary reason was an "elevated operating voltage." The full statement released by Thomas Hannaford is below:

“We have determined that elevated operating voltage is causing instability issues in some 13th/14th Gen desktop processors. Our analysis of returned processors confirms that the elevated operating voltage is stemming from a microcode algorithm resulting in incorrect voltage requests to the processor.”

At the time, for context, Intel told me that pretty much every motherboard capable of running the Intel Core i9-14900K runs the CPU out of spec, unlocking its power limits and technically voiding the warranty. That includes Asus and Gigabyte motherboards to name a few, as these motherboards typically overclock the CPU out of the box unless you disable it. By default, these are considered "safe" overclocks, in that a user could slot their CPU into the motherboard and it would just work at a higher clock speed. This practice obviously benefits Intel in a sense though, as it means these CPUs score higher in benchmarks.

In theory, this would mean that should any problems arise, it wouldn't necessarily be Intel's fault. However, there's more to it than that, as users have been testing in-spec configurations that appear to trigger the same underlying problem. As it stands, Intel hasn't officially revealed what the problem is, but it appears to be related to the Raptor Lake architecture given that it also affects 13th Generation i9 CPUs.

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How you can fix your i9 crashing problems

We identified a fix a few months ago, with help from Faceit

Intel XTU Advanced Tuning.

When I first spoke with Faceit, they helped me identify a fix for the problem that at the time, brought my PC back to its normal stability. Using XTU's advanced tuning, I was able to decrease the clock speed of all cores to 5.2GHz. This has entirely fixed the problem for me, and when I do this on boot, my PC goes from unstable to completely usable. Obviously, it sucks to leave extra performance on the table like that, but it works, which is more than I could say it did previously.

Since then, many motherboard vendors have released BIOS updates that introduce a new Intel Default Settings option. This setting will essentially decrease the speed of your CPU in a similar way, but doesn't require the use of a third-party program and will do it no matter the operating system you use. Intel doesn't recommend using this setting, but given that the alternative is to cause damage to your CPU, you should use it until the company releases its microcode update in mid-August. I am currently using Intel Default Settings on my CPU, and I am not experiencing any crashes.

We're keeping an eye on what Intel says next about the situation, but if you have 13th Gen i9 or 14th Gen i9 and are experiencing weird behaviors, this is likely the cause. We recommend updating your BIOS. You can contact the seller that you purchased your CPU from or Intel if you're having problems, and a friend of mine eventually picked up an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D instead. He is no longer having any crashing problems in any of his applications.

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