Game dev on Intel’s unstable CPUs: ‘I might lose over $100K’

Intel’s best processors have been crashing for months, and despite many attempts, the issue is nowhere near being fixed. In fact, the impact might be far worse than we thought.

Original reports about stability issues with the Core i9-13900K and the Core i9-14900K came from PC gamers, but now, we’re hearing that they’re crashing in servers, too. That can lead to serious damage, with one game dev estimating the instability may cost them up to $100K in lost players.

The latest scoop comes from YouTuber Level1Techs, who obtained usage data with crash reports from two different games. The games were left unnamed, but the data from them is quite telling in regard to the scale of the problem. Remember that this data needs to be taken with some skepticism, as some system crashes may never be reported, especially during blue screens, and we’re only looking at two titles.

Intel has a Pretty Big Problem

Level1Techs looked into decompression errors, which Oodle (a decompression tool) had already talked about earlier this year. In total, the YouTuber found 1,584 decompression errors in the databases, spanning a 90-day period. Out of the 1,584 errors, a whopping 1,431 can be attributed to Intel’s 13th and 14th-gen CPUs. Meanwhile, Level1Techs only found four decompression errors related to AMD CPUs.

Another staggering bit of data? Apart from the Core i9-14900K and the Core i9-13900K, the CPU with the highest error rate was the Core i7-9750H with just 11 instances of decompression failure. The gap between the latest chips from Intel and every other processor is undeniably wide. One more thing to note is that on the whole, about 70% of users in the database were running an Intel-based system, while 30% were on AMD.

During the research process, the YouTuber also discovered that gamers weren’t the only ones to suffer from these instability issues. The Core i9-13900K and the Core i9-14900K are also used in data centers for things such as running game servers, and in those settings, they’re often paired with W680 motherboards. Those boards are more focused on stability than pushing performance, which kind of goes against various claims that overclocking is the root cause of the issue.

One of the companies the YouTuber spoke with happened to be in the process of negotiating a deal for $100K worth of servers, and they were told that running an Intel platform is over $1,000 more expensive than a comparable system from AMD. When digging deeper, Level1Techs discovered that this is due to the high rate of support incidents related to the 13th-gen and 14th-gen Intel CPUs.

“Support incidents have been unusually high for that configuration, […] Recently, we’ve had to update the BIOS, disable the e-cores, or do CPU swaps to get the issues resolved. And we’re not sure the issue is fully resolved, so we are charging a support premium for those systems right now,” said the anonymous data center service provider. “Something isn’t right with the 13900K and the 14900K. […] We’ve been steering customers toward 7950X systems instead.”

Moreover, a game developer that Level1Techs spoke to said: “I might lose over $100K in lost players from these [multiplayer server] crashes.” It’s understandable that gamers would give up on a title that’s unstable, either due to their own PC configuration or due to the servers often crashing.

Anonymous sources from Dell, HP, and Lenovo told the YouTuber to expect around 10% to 25% of Core i9-13900K and Core i9-14900K processors to have some sort of a problem. Level1Techs claims the number may be closer to 50%. If your PC is also struggling with these problems, we have a guide that might help.