DIY Intel Fix? Intel 13th/14th Gen Crashing Issues and Undervolting

A fix is coming for Intel’s long-running Raptor Lake instability crisis

If you haven’t heard of Intel’s 13th/14th gen Raptor Lake stability issues, you must have been living under a rock. Thankfully, Intel has confirmed that a microcode fix is on the way, which hopefully means that this problem will soon be behind us. That said, we will have to wait until at least mid-August for this update. So what can you do in the meantime? The answer your stability concerns may be Undervolting your Intel CPU.

When Intel launched the their 14th generation CPU lineup, we were concerned about voltages. In fact, we said in our Intel 14th generation CPU review that the i5-14600K, i7-14700K, and i9-14900K all benefitted from undervolting. Now, Intel are blaming “elevated operating voltage”, and a problematic “microcode algorithm” on their CPU instability.

In our mind, Intel blaming “elevated operating voltage” tells us that undervolting may be a solid DIY fix for Intel CPU stability issues. Yes, Intel’s official fix will (hopefully) address the issue at its core, but a good undervolt will have benefit beyond helping to increase system stability. A good undervolt will also reduce power draw and system temperatures.

A DIY Fix? Try Undervolting your Intel CPU

If we are honest, we have never experienced the instability that others have reported with Intel’s 14th generation Raptor Lake CPUs. One of the reasons for this may be because of our CPU undervolting guide. All of the Intel CPUs that we regularly use in the office have been undervolted. This has lowered system thermals, reduced CPU voltages, and lowered power draw. Even after days-long benchmarking loops, our CPUs have remained stable under load.

Back in March, we released our Intel CPU Undervolting Guide. In this guide we undervolted various Intel 14th generation CPUs using motherboards from ASUS, Gigabyte, and MSI. Through undervolting, we managed to achieve lower CPU thermals, and lowered system power draw. This was achieved without a drop in system performance. In fact, some of our systems ran faster after undervolting, as our system was no longer thermal throttling.

This guide was released before Intel’s Raptor Lake stability issues were widely known about. That said, we did receive feedback from readers/watchers that our undervolting guide helped make their PCs more stable. One user reported Adobe Premiere and Media Encoder crashing frequently before they undervolted their system. That user claimed that undervolting “fixed everything”.

While undervolting is not a guaranteed fix for Intel Raptor Lake stability issues, our experience is that it does help. Before Raptor Lake’s stability issues came to light, we thought that overheating was the cause of stability issues for some users. Now that Intel has confirmed that “elevated operating voltage” is part of the problem, it now makes sense how undervolting has helped many users.

Closing thoughts

Based on our experience with Raptor Lake, Intel needs to take serious action to control the voltages that their CPUs are running at. No, we aren’t just taking about the voltage bug that’s apparently at the core of Raptor Lake’s stability issues; but more generally.

We have worked with an insane number of motherboards over the years. We have frequently found that some Intel motherboards deliver a lot more voltage to CPUs than others. This happens even if we use the same CPU on both motherboards. We won’t call out any specific motherboard manufacturers here. However, we will say that Intel needs to take voltage control more seriously, and work with their motherboard partners to make things more consistent.

Lower CPU voltages often comes lower system thermals and lower power draw. With this in mind, good voltage control is something that needs to be improved. With Raptor Lake, voltage issues have resulted in system instability on stock systems. That shouldn’t be the case. End users should be able to build their systems and not be concerned about system stability when running their PCs at stock settings.

While we are calling undervolting a potential DIY fix for Raptor Lake’s stability issues, we also think that the fact we need to recommend this is a HUGE problem. Intel needs to get their power draw and CPU voltages under control. Hopefully this is fixed with LGA1851 and Arrow Lake, as things can’t go on like this.

Hopefully Intel’s planned fix Raptor Lake’s stability issues will indeed fix things. Users should be confided that their PCs will be stable at stock settings. The fact that this isn’t the case right now is a huge problem; one that needs to be addressed quickly.

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