Leaked Intel documents reportedly show the company has made significant strides in potentially fixing 13th and 14th Gen CPU instability issues. Team Blue says it hasn’t yet found the “root cause” and claims that investigations are still ongoing, but there’s light at the end of the tunnel with a solution for a likely related bug.
The best CPUs in Intel’s Raptor Lake line-up have been unstable for quite some time, but the issue rose to prominence in February 2024. Fingers immediately pointed towards Core i9 power limits being the problem, and some believed a sharp underclock or Baseline profile could fix it. However, this wasn’t the silver bullet people hoped for, and it’s less than ideal when it requires you to sacrifice performance you’ve paid for.
Igor’s Lab has since revealed an internal document allegedly bound by a non-disclosure agreement (NDA), titled “Enhanced Thermal Velocity Boost (eTVB) May Miscalculate Frequency Limits.” The report suggests that “an incorrect frequency limit calculation may allow the processor to operate at a high-frequency state at a high temperature,” bottlenecking performance with wonky frame rates and, in some cases, shutting games down entirely.
eTVB is a feature Intel developed for Raptor Lake S processors that automatically overclocks CPU cores beyond max clock speeds based on how much power and thermal headroom is available. Naturally, running the best CPU cooler lets you go even further, as does a high-capacity power supply to feed the processor more juice. The aim is to give short bursts when you play games and scale things back down to remain efficient during idle use. Unfortunately, it looks like issues with calculations leave chips running faster and hotter than they should.
Although this bug could relate to the overarching problem, Intel quickly told Tom’s Hardware that the investigation is far from over:
“Contrary to recent media reports, Intel has not confirmed root cause and is continuing, with its partners, to investigate user reports regarding instability issues on unlocked Intel Core 13th and 14th generation (K/KF/KS) desktop processors. The microcode patch referenced in press reports fixes an eTVB bug discovered by Intel while investigating the instability reports. While this issue is potentially contributing to instability, it is not the root cause.”
We don’t know when Intel plans to address the wider i9 instability issues, but the eTVB fix should come in the form of a BIOS update that’s due soon. The original report recommends everyone upgrade to microcode 0x125 or later by July 19, 2024, so keep checking your motherboard manufacturer’s product page.