Why We Can't Recommend Intel CPUs - Stability Story So Far

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Why We Can't Recommend Intel CPUs - Stability Story So Far

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Outro music by David Vonk/DaJaVo

[Tainted]

This must be serious. Steve's standing.... STANDING!

[Burdman]

"Intel Inside" is now a warning.

[gamerdudegamerdude]

Consumer: My cpu is dying!

Intel: ~Deal with it!~

[Aquineas]

For those who might not be aware, Gelsinger was a VP at Intel during the FDIV fiasco circa 1993. Intel took a long time to admit there was a floating point calculation problem, and when they finally agreed to a recall, initially you had to justify to them that you were worthy of getting your CPU replaced by proving that you used your CPU for floating point. I knew there was a problem months before they "fessed" up because interest rate calculations were off

[GoblinGrenade]

If Intel does not recall the affected products, any credibility that they have left will be erased.

[achaycock]

For someone my age, this story sounds awfully familiar. I am old enough to remember the issues with the first Pentium processors and how Intel reacted to the floating point bug. I especially remember Hard[OCP] and Tomshardware reporting on the faulty Pentium III 1.13GHz processor and how they seemed to bully the journalists reporting on this. Intel blaming others has been in their playbook for at least 30 years now and it's such a shame to see them carrying on.
I don't game anymore and so my processor needs have changed - funnily enough the e-core and p-core arrangement was appealing for my photo editing while multi-tasking work flow and I am reaching that point of wanting to swap out my aging 9700k. I suspect it will be an 8 or 12 core Ryzen on the horizon for me now. Such a shame.

[Schweppese]

3:16 It was disappointing watching Linus Media Group blame it on the board partners considering how big of a media outlet they are. On the other hand, Gamers Nexus and Level1Techs are doing some excellent journalism and deserve all the praise and support. We as customers should be grateful for their work.

[WayStedYou]

15, 000 people used to work here, now it's a ghost town

[warnacokelat]

Born too late to own a house, too soon to be a tiktok influencer, but just in time to see the downfall of Intel in real time.

[jon-umber]

Can't recommend Intel CPUs but have affiliate links to buy them in the video description?

[Ghastly]

Been a Intel user for years, and with what has been happening was so glad I went AMD for my new system, I dodged huge bullet here.

[aqualung]

The number of Intel fans (and even YouTube channels!) that are _still_ defending Intel is absolutely shocking.

[ryanj]

This is worst case scenario for a microchip company. They sell ~40 million chips a quarter. If even 25% of them are affected models, they're looking at nearly 100 million CPU's that in theory need replacing. That is, simply put, bankruptcy, to initiate a recall.

[BSD]

Thought I'd share my experience. I purchased a boxed 13900K, Asus Z690-E Gaming motherboard and Corsair Dominator 2X16GB 5600MT/s RAM in November, 2022. In the beginning, I didn't have any major issues but within five months I started to see the classic issues of a degraded CPU: BSOD's, Out of VRAM in games, decompression issues, desktop stuttering and lag, freezes, random reboots, USB ports disconnecting and reconnecting, POST boot failures when running XMP profiles (dropping RAM speed down to 4800), extremely high total system power at idle (250-300W) and over 600W under full load (with temps over 200 degrees), Cinebench and other CPU benchmarks freezing, crashing and not completing - just to name a few.

Like everyone in the beginning, I started trouble shooting the issue and tried: BIOS updates, BIOS settings, three different sets of RAM, three motherboards (Gigabyte Z790 Aorus Master, MSI Z790 MEG ACE, Asus Z790-E Gaming), three power supplies (Asus Thor 850W and 1200W, Thermaltake Tough Power 1200W) - but all of the issues followed the processor. I finally filed a warranty claim with Intel at the beginning of May, 2024. At first, I went back and forth with Intel for a few weeks as they replied with BIOS suggestions to try, none of them worked. On May 30th, they finally admitted the CPU was defective, so I paid $630 for a cross-shipped replacement.

The replacement arrived and I tested it in my MSI Z790 MEG ACE motherboard. I confirmed it had the X0125 microcode and It had a much higher serial and batch number. It was boxed, but it had a sticker on it stating it came from inventory marked 'good'. Within a few days the USB disconnect/reconnect issue started happening and instead of crashing when starting Unreal games, it was choppy and stuttered until the game was fully loaded. On the fourth day, it BSOD while playing a YouTube video, ironically about the whole Intel issue. I took that as a sign.

That weekend, I drove down to my local Micro Center and picked up an AMD 7950X3D, Asus X670E Proart Creator motherboard, Crucial 2TB T705 Gen5 NVME and a set of 2X32GB Corsair Dominator Titanium 6000MT/s RAM. I swapped everything out and all of my issues disappeared. I couldn't be happier with AMD. Temps are stable, power consumption is half of my 13900K system and games load and play as they should. This is how I expected my 13900K system to run, but it was a nightmare of issues for over a year. Switching to AMD has been pure joy and I can't see myself going back to Intel anytime soon.

[tommihommi]

you know it's serious when the CEO is literally posting bible quotes about looking forward on twitter

[Hjominbonrun]

I really want to know what UserBenchmark has to say.

[Swolesy]

In Australia this is a breach of consumer protection laws as the product doesnt work as expected.

[BrandensOutdoorChannel]

A few months ago a friend of mine asked me to build him a PC to replace his 12 year old Dell. I went with an AM5 socket and 7700X CPU. Very glad I did because he knows nothing about computers and we avoided this Intel headache.

[Maxrepfitgm]

I have applied the too broke to buy new CPUs patch so I'm immune to intel's stability issues

[Gurkx]

Shouldn't the retail stores also warn customers about intel?