Intel Finally Talks About Raptor Lake Instability Issues

Intel has been embroiled in months of controversy over its Raptor Lake processors causing instability in games. The company was reported to be looking into the situation in April, then issued what was supposed to be a “fix” for the issue in May, but problems have persisted. Now, the company is out with its first lengthy statement about the situation, laying out the results of its own internal investigation, which it says uncovered incorrect voltages being requested by its processors. The company says it will resolve the issue with a microcode update in mid-August.

The company’s full statement was posted in its forums. The TL;DR is that it examined returned processors and found “elevated voltages” are the cause of the issue. In addition, those too-high voltages are caused by an algorithm that requests the voltages. The critical part of the statement reads, “Our analysis of returned processors confirms that the elevated operating voltage is stemming from a microcode algorithm resulting in incorrect voltage requests to the processor.”

Intel has finally addressed the gaming instability issue, but we’ll have to wait and see if the update actually fixes the issue.
Credit: Intel

We’ll have to wait a few weeks to see if this fixes the problem because the previous “baseline” and “Intel Default” BIOS settings didn’t work for everybody. This whole time, it’s been apparent that these Raptor Lake chips were either running clocks that were too high, with too much voltage, or both. The initial “fix” was just to lower the clocks, and then new BIOSes altered the power profiles of the CPUs, but it appears there’s also a problem with how the CPUs receive voltage requests.

Most of the reports of instability have involved the Core i9-13900K and 14900K, but there have also been reports of Core i5 and i7 CPUs suffering from instability. The big issue with the adjusted voltages will undoubtedly be how they affect performance, as they will certainly be lowered. For example, when the “baseline” settings BIOS came out, it was found to reduce performance by up to 9% in some workloads, but that’s preferable to an unstable system. However, the situation has painted Intel in a terrible light, with multiple Tech Tubers posting videos calling for Intel to address this issue.

Now that it has finally revealed what it thinks is the cause, we will have to wait and see if it is eventually resolved. If you have a Raptor Lake CPU, keep your eyes peeled for the incoming update in mid-August. However, if you’re not experiencing any instability, we’d recommend holding off since there’s no sense in fixing what isn’t broken.