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Falcon Northwest is offering some advice to help those impacted by unstable Core i9 CPUs

Boutique PC maker Falcon Northwest on Wednesday night offered a potential stopgap fix to address reported random instability issues with some Intel 13th- and 14th-gen Intel Core CPUs, such as the Core i7-14700K and the Core i9-13900K.

The mysterious problem has vexed an unknown number of PC gamers for months now, with no seeming rhyme or reason as to the cause, but Falcon has some suggestions that may help some impacted users. The company posted the BIOS adjustments advice to its X.com account here.

“As you know Intel is investigating reports of 13th/14th gen CPUs causing crashes,” said Falcon Northwest owner Kelt Reeves in an email sent to media outlets. “This is a real issue and Intel is aggressively working the problem, but it’s complex and is taking longer than we hoped.”

Intel previously confirmed with PCWorld it has been investigating the situation but as of this week, still had no insight to share as to what the root cause is.

The situation has been on a low-boil for months now after video game tool developer RAD published an advisory on Jan. 11 recommending that gamers underclock Intel Core i9 CPUs to address errors with game compression. RAD’s advice somewhat mirrors Falcon Northwest’s adjustments, but the PC maker offered additional tweaks it found that worked while apparently not forcing major reductions in clock speeds.

The problem kicked into high-gear this week when Nvidia threw Intel under the bus and said that those experiencing “out of memory errors” should contact Intel rather than Nvidia. The problem has been no surprise to us at PCWorld, where we documented the problem with one of our recent PC builds on video. In the video, we were only able to solve the issue by swapping the Core i9 with another CPU.

We should again note that while Intel has acknowledged it is investigating, the number of CPUs impacted is unknown at this point, and most of the anecdotal reports PCWorld has found indicate the company hasn’t hassled customers seeking to exchange CPUs. Basically, don’t panic–at least not yet.

Thus far, many of the reports seem to manifest during compiling of shaders in games. Not all problems occur during shader compiles though. Our own bad CPU manifested crashing in Fortnite, which we believe to be related to the game’s anti-cheat technology tripping and intentionally quitting the game. Last week, ZDNet Korea reported that gamers were experiencing crashes in Tekken 8 due to “out of memory errors” and in one day, up to 10 people returned their Intel CPUs they believed to be the problem.

Falcon Northwest said it is offering the advice to hopefully help those with problems–but it also is labeling the advice as a “work in progress” and “beta” advice.