Complaints about crashing 13th, 14th Gen Intel CPUs now have data to back them up

Alderon Games, the maker of dinosaur MMO Path of Titans, says it’s swapping out its Intel 13th and 14th Gen-based servers for AMD and urges others hosting the game’s servers to do the same. The developer has had “significant” instability issues that none of the fixes so far have reversed, wrote Alderon founder Matthew Cassells in a blog post last week.

Cassells wrote that Alderon has recorded “thousands of crashes” on gamers’ CPUs using its crash reporting tools and says the processors can also corrupt SSDs and memory. He added that in his team’s experience, 100 percent of the affected CPUs “deteriorate over time, eventually failing.” On the contrary, Unreal Engine decompression tool maker RAD Game Tools, which Cassells cites in the blog, says that “only a small fraction” of the processors are affected.

Suggestions that Intel’s i9-13900K and i9-14900K CPUs are corrupting storage and memory and causing servers using them to crash is a new turn in this saga, which started in April with the company investigating game crashes on home computers using the chips. Motherboards with improper overclocking settings were cited by Intel as an apparent culprit at one time, but as Level1Techs points out in the above video, that doesn’t account for crashes seen on server hardware, which should be set more conservatively.

Image: [DE]Glen / Warframe forums

Earlier in the week, a Warframe developer wrote on the game’s forums that “almost all” of the crashes it recorded came from driver failures in 13th- and 14th-Gen Intel processors. He did note that failures seen on a staff member’s gaming rig stopped after he installed a recent BIOS update, even though Intel said in June that the problem it addresses isn’t the root cause of instability.