Is it overclocking or will we see an update?
A small number of Intel system users have reported frequent crashes while playing games and benchmarking their Core i9 13900K or 14900K. The crashes are repeatable, particularly in specific games developed by RAD on Unreal Engine, but also extend to tests such as RealBench, CineBench, Prime95, Handbrake and Visual Studio. The crashes were traced to processors with specific BIOS settings for clock frequency and power consumption.
The findings do suggest that removing these settings should restore stability, or if this is happening with default settings, better cooling or a new power supply should fix the problem. This does raise an interesting question, and has been asked before; why would Intel allow these settings to be applied if they would introduce instability. A software developer named Dan Luu, who has been paying attention to this kind of thing for nearly a decade, noticed a decline in Intel’s chip verification process. This decline makes these edge cases more common; to be fair, the increasing complexity of our chips makes proper verification more difficult than it was just a few years ago.
If you encounter this problem, it is recommended to set the “SVID Behavior” in the BIOS to “Intel Fail-Safe” and consider reducing the “Long Term Power Limit” and “Short Term Power Limit” issues (if this does not resolve the issue). Intel has yet to comment and it will be interesting to see if they prefer to blame motherboard BIOS settings, or if we see a small microcode patch released to fix the issue.