Intel

If you’ve been experiencing crashes and BSoDs with an Intel Core i9 CPU, you’re not alone. We investigated the problem and may have identified a fix.

Over the last couple of months, reports have been pouring in from Intel Core i9-14900K owners who have said that they’re experiencing crashes and blue screens of death in multiple applications and on multiple computers. I’ve been investigating the problem for a couple of months, and I can confirm that there is a problem that Intel is working on identifying currently. With games like Tekken 8 drawing additional attention to the issue, more and more users have reported random blue screens of death along with other applications inexplicably crashing too.

From what I’ve identified, this problem can affect a ton of different applications. I experienced it with Davinci Resolve where videos would fail to render, I experienced it with Escape from Tarkov where I would experience Unity-related crashes, and I experienced it in Counter-Strikewhere my computer would blue screen if I loaded a map in the game with an anti-cheat enabled.

The latter example is what drew my attention to the problem, and how I discovered that it was very likely to be a CPU bug with my Intel Core i9-14900K. I’ve been investigating this problem for a few months, and while it’s still not clear what the cause is, we at least identified a fix that seems to consistently work across machines.

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

I first experienced it with anti-cheat software

Way back in January, I was trying to find out what the cause of my 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.

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.

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

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 to my knowledge is still ongoing, according to statements that the company has given to other outlets in response to the Tekken 8 debacle. 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.

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

When I first spoke with Faceit, they helped me identify a fix for the problem that so far, has 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 workswhich is more than I could say it did previously.

For what it’s worth, I’ve had another friend who had the same issue with a 13th Gen i9 say that they recently received a BIOS update that improved the problem and made it so he could play Counter-Strike again, but other programs still crash, and my most recent BIOS update hasn’t fixed it on my machine either. So far, the only thing that has worked is underclocking my CPU, as anything else makes most applications unusable, with my computer struggling to perform even basic functions otherwise.

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 underclocking your PC to see if it fixes the problem, and if not, try another CPU. If it no longer happens with a different CPU, we recommend contacting the retailer you purchased your i9 from to get a refund or a replacement.

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