Intel Denies RMA Requests For 14th & 13th Gen Desktop CPUs Plagued With Instability Issues, System Providers Switch To AMD Ryzen

Intel's 14th & 13th Gen CPU instability issues have tarnished the company's reputation, as they fail to address customer concerns & even RMA requests.

Intel and its 14th & 13th Gen Desktop CPUs seem to have bothered consumers a lot, and the problem has gone way too far now. The fiasco has been quite long, with Intel initially being completely clueless about what's causing the issue. The company planned to release an official update a few months ago but there's been nothing besides making motherboard makers to use the Default Power Limits and issuing a fix for an eTVB bug which was also discovered while the company was investigating the primary issue.

Our editor, Hassan, has already stated that he has been experiencing these issues since early 2023. Thousands of other gamers have also been facing similar issues. The commonality is that the majority of these cases are associated with Intel's 14th and 13th-generation chips.

I built a new gaming PC for myself back when the 4090 launched. I upgraded from a 12900K to a 13900K & everything ran well besides the high temperatures that were within the TjMax limit but hit 95C using a high end AIO cooler.

A few months later. I started having the same issues https://t.co/ASMgCRrFu8

— Hassan Mujtaba (@hms1193) February 21, 2024

While the problem hasn't been fully addressed, Intel has further bothered consumers by not providing adequate customer service, whether in the form of RMA requests or even inquiries for potential fixes and the problem itself.

HardwareTimes has disclosed one such incident, in which they discuss how Intel denied the RMA for a "plagued" Core i9-13900KF despite the company offering it in the first place. The media outlet reports that they had two units that they wanted to go through the RMA process, the Core i9-13900KF and the Core i7-14700KF. Intel decided to continue with RMA for the latter processor successfully, but the firm declined the request for the Core i9 variant.

The outlet says the Core i9-13900KF unit had a PCIe fault limiting bus utilization. When using the PCIe Gen 5 lanes, the computer didn't work at all and went into BSOD. However, when the interface was changed to a PCIe Gen 4 x4, it became functional, but the bandwidth was significantly compromised.

When this issue was brought to Intel, the firm replaced the 13th Gen CPU with a brand new unit, but that, too, became a victim of problems only after two months of usage, and the event view logger showed a whopping 44,242 error events in four months.

Unfortunately, Intel denied the RMA request for the second unit despite initially agreeing to a refund. The problem has reached a new level now, and this incident is only from one consumer who became a victim of the issue. Several such events do not surface publicly; hence, this shows that Intel hasn't been able to mediate the instability issues at all, at least when it comes to agreeing upon "reasonable" RMA requests.

In another development, data from Level1Techs shows that Intel's 13th and 14th Gen CPUs have represented a major portion of error logs at Oodle game telemetry data, linked with the 14th and 13th Gen CPUs. Team Blue accounted for 1,431 decompression errors, while AMD, on the other hand, only had four such errors, which is significantly lower than Intel. A breakdown shows that more than 70% of Intel's CPUs were prone to errors compared to 30% of AMD, which shows that the situation is alarming for Intel.

Certain issues such as the "Out of Video Memory" error are also associated with faulty and buggy Intel CPUs as they usually fail during the Shader Compilation process which pushes the chips to their limits and that's where they would often crash the game or even worse, result in a BSOD.

Resentment from customers, professional clients, and even motherboard manufacturers shows that Intel needs to come up with a "definitive" solution for the problem, as it doesn't look to stop for now. The instability issues could potentially sabotage the launch of the upcoming Arrow Lake desktop CPUs as well, putting Intel way behind competitors. It has also been reported in the past that several PC builders are switching from Intel's 14th & 13th gen Core CPUs to AMD's Ryzen chips as they are less buggy and the same happens to be the case for several system providers who are now actively switching over to Ryzen to meet the needs of the clients.