The Raptor Lake overvolting saga has been a wild and painful one for owners of 13th gen and 14th gen Intel CPUs. Now, Intel has put out a microcode update that promises to finally fix it, although we remain to see if it will.
Intel has released a new microcode update for its 13th and 14th Gen Raptor Lake processors in an attempt to further mitigate itsongoing and controversial overvolting issue. The update aims to prevent the CPU from requesting excessive power during idle or light tasks, which can lead (and has led) to premature aging and instability.
Like previous updates and older attempts at culling this, this is only a preventive measure that will help owners with new or slightly used chips from reaching the point where the chips will crash. If your CPU is already crashing, there’s not a lot Intel can do. As Intel has explained already, the crashing is due topermanent hardware damage, and it’s probably a point of no return. If you’re experiencing crashing, you should contact Intel or your PC system provider for assistance under the special extended warranty.
The rollout of BIOS updates containing the new microcode may take several weeks, but if you haven’t done so, you should probably start installing older updates that include previous microcode fixes and power settings that can also help reduce the risk of damage.
Intel has not yet disclosed the number of Raptor Lake chips affected by this and other instability issues, nor has it identified specific batches affected by an earlier oxidization issue. The company has, however, stated that its laptop chips are not affected by the voltage issue or other known causes of desktop chip instability.
We’ll have to see whether this new update will finally put an end to this issue for good. Even if it did, it’s probably still going to be pretty controversial for some time. Lots of people out there have probably already suffered hardware damage, and Intel will need to handle that. There are also lots of other people that will still suffer from damage since they don’t usually update their BIOS.
