Intel's situation goes far beyond a bad season. The company's shares lost 40 percent of their value, the wave of layoffs and cuts was poorly received, and as if that weren't enough, it has been battling for months with failures in its 13th and 14th generation Raptor Lake processors. On this last point, today we can say that a more or less definitive solution has emerged for Raptor Lake chip users, in the form of BIOS/UEFI updates. Why more or less? Because applying them does not repair damaged processors, and the beta nature of the updates always raises doubts...
The drama began in February: several users of "high-end" processors from Intel's Raptor Lake family turned to the Web to report stability issues. At the top of that list were the Core i9-13900K and Core i9-14900K, but over time those reports spread to other models in the same family. The first recommendations were to apply downclocking and undervolting to the chips, as well as limiting power profiles on many motherboards.
New BIOS/UEFI updates aim to fix Raptor Lake problems
Finally, the company officially confirmed on July 22 that the processors were operating at a higher voltage than necessary, caused by an algorithm in the microcode with "incorrect requests". Some online sources point to a bug in the eTVB (Enhanced Thermal Velocity Boost) system, but Intel said at the time that was "part" of the problem. In the official statement, Intel added that a patch would be ready "by mid-August". To top it off, none of the corrections can restore damaged processors, and there will be no hardware recall. The official response was to extend the warranty on certain models by two years (list available here) and accelerate the distribution of updates. That's what brings us together today.
Both Asus and MSI have released the first round of BIOS/UEFI updates for their main motherboards compatible with Raptor Lake processors. MSI decided to focus on the MEG, MAG, MPG, and PRO models with the Z790 chipset, while Asus published its initial list here. We imagine other manufacturers will launch their own updates soon, but it's not a bad idea to have the latest BIOS/UEFI version at a minimum.
Now, what does the fine print say? The shared BIOS/UEFI have beta status. Not everyone is prone to install a potentially unstable BIOS/UEFI for other reasons, but if it fixes an overvoltage issue, at the end of the day users should accept this compromise.
Source: The Verge
