Tech Bulletin: PC Hardware Critical Issue Intel CPU

Dear Friends and Barbarians,

Instead of game night I helped two Conan friends with their new-ish PCs. One friend has what I would consider the worst-case scenario and will need a CPU replacement. The other looks like they are doing just fine and have not run into issues.

Tech Bulletin:
Intel 13 or 14 Generation CPUs
If run at a high temperature (outside its temp envelope) due to a software bug within the chip, it will suffer irreversible damage. Please see this ZDNET article for details and solutions. There is within this article a link to Tom’s Hardware where there are a number of resources for you if you have one of these CPUs.

I am making this here, rather than in the Bug Section, due to the confluence of casual gamers and high demands from their PCs. We all know a software company is not responsible when we overdrive our PCs, and it is terrible when the “default” use of a game or application might cause damage to your hardware. Entirely out of your control.

My intent was to poast this here as a bulletin, and I have already issued a warning to another user who may be wishing to get better performance in the game. Let’s all proceed with caution, especially if you have a machine that was overclocked by the manufacturer.

With love and aspirations of temps below 73C,

Barnes

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This reminds me of the time when AMD processors didn’t shut down when overheating and would burn themselves up. This was a very very long time ago however, remember learning about it in college.

Very odd to see this hit modern processors and unfortunate.

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In my Intel Simulator, when this bulletin came out, you can run a whole virtual Windows PC with Intel Extreme Tuning on it. I’m sure you’re familiar with this utility. I use this to tune and test the virtual hardware.

A virtual machine that “arrives in the box” with a physical CPU of 3.5 GHz is out of the box overclocked to 4.5 GHz with the on-board utilities.

During Benchmarking only, we hit thermal throttling at 100C but the chip read almost 115C. This is deadly ugly.

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