Intel extends warranty for its unstable CPUs – here’s what buyers of 13th-gen and 14th-gen chips need to know

Intel just upped its warranty to five years, ramping up damage control efforts

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Intelhas made a further move in damage control over the issues with 13th-gen and 14th-genprocessorssuffering from instability and crashing, announcing that the warranties of CPUs from these generations have been extended by two years.

As per a statement from Intel’s Communications Manager, Thomas Hannaford, all Raptor Lake and Raptor Lake Refresh CPUs now have a five-year warranty period, rather than the standard three-year warranty.

Hannafordwrites: “Intel is committed to making sure all customers who have or are currently experiencing instability symptoms on their 13th and/or 14th-gen desktop processors are supported in the exchange process. We stand behind our products, and in the coming days we will be sharing more details on two-year extended warranty support for our boxed Intel Core 13th and 14th-gen desktop processors.”

“In the meantime, if you are currently or previously experienced instability symptoms on your Intel Core 13th/14th-gen desktop system:

“For users who purchased systems from OEM/System Integrators – please reach out to your system manufacturer’s support team for further assistance.

“For users who purchased a boxed CPU – please reach out to Intel Customer Support for further assistance.

“At the same time, we apologize for the delay in communications as this has been a challenging issue to unravel and definitively root cause.”

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Note that the warranty is only being extended to five years for boxed processors, as stated in the first paragraph.

Analysis: What should you do if you own one of these CPUs?

There are a few points to note here in terms of what action you might want to take. If you have bought an Intel CPU from these generations and are having any issues with instability on a continual basis (the odd fleeting crash can happen to any PC), we’d immediately contact Intel as advised above for boxed products, or the firm you bought your PC from if the processor came in a prebuilt computer.

Quite simply, get your CPU replaced, although you’ll likely have to jump through some hoops with Intel support in terms of checking and diagnosing the chip. If you are having any kind of persistent crashing, we’d insist firmly on a replacement at this point.

What isn’t clear is whether the replacement CPU shipped back to you will be bulletproof or not regarding these stability issues. Intel has a microcode patch, due mid-August,which acts as a preventative measureto stop the processor from degrading and starting to suffer from reliability issues – so will this already be incorporated in CPUs sent out, going forward? Or will the patch need to be manually applied upon its release? If the latter, then you might want to wait until the patch arrives before installing and running the replacement CPU in your PC, for obvious reasons.

Once that patch is in place – or if it’s already included on-board the chip anyway – your new CPU should be okay from thereon out. Although we still aren’t too happy that Intel hasn’t fully pinned down root causes for these problems. (Despite Hannaford’s hint that this has beendefinitivelyroot-caused in the above statement, as far as we’re aware, Intel is still investigating – or at least we’ve not heard anything concrete to suggest otherwise).

Intel has previously told us that a key cause of the instability iselevated voltages, which said microcode patch tackles – but that’s not necessarily the only factor at play. We simply don’t know if there might be more gremlins in the works, and note that the patch most likely won’t do anything at all for CPUs which have already been affected (and have been suffering the issue worsening for some time, going by reports).

It’s worth noting that Intel has also previously said that the issue affects CPUs with a TDP of 65W or more, so if you have a processor under a Core i5, then it shouldn’t be experiencing the problem at all.

What about if you do have a Core i5, Core i7 orCore i9processor from the 13th-gen or 14th-gen families, but it’s not misfiring or experiencing any crashes? Well, hopefully after the microcode update later this month, you should be good going forward.

The worry in this scenario is that there might be hidden damage to the chip which isn’t causing any reliability issues yet, but eventually, these could manifest much later down the line. It’s presumably because of this concern that Intel has extended the warranty coverage to five years, to help folks feel more reassured that they won’t be left in the lurch.

Is five years enough in terms of the lifespan of a processor? We’d ideally like a chip to last longer than that – and of course it might do – but while this extra warranty coverage is clearly a good thing, it doesn’t fully comfort us.

At any rate, as the years go by, if you have any sign of reliability issues with one of these Intel processors, we wouldn’t hesitate to initiate a return while still in warranty coverage. In this case, we feel it’s definitely better to be safe than sorry at any hints of instability woes (though at the same time, don’t panic if your PC has the odd crash – this happens, of course, to all machines occasionally).

The other thorny part of all this is the oxidation problem that Intel has admitted affects earlier 13th-gen CPUs only, in that we still haven’t been given exact batch numbers of chips that might be hit by this problem (apparently it’s a separate issue to the instability gremlins). It seems this is a difficult one for Intel to pin down, too, but again it’s causing a good deal of fretting from those with a last-gen Raptor Lake CPU, who just want it clarified as to whether their chip might have the oxidation blues – and would need replacing.

There’s still a lot for Intel to sort out here, and with Ryzen 9000 CPUs about to launch, Team Blue could be in trouble when it comes to the battle of the next-gen CPUs. The danger is that this whole fracas is going to put off would-be buyers ofIntel’s incoming Arrow Lake processorsfor desktop, and with Ryzen 9000 arriving much earlier,possibly with attractive pricing if a fresh leak is correct, it looks like Team Blue is navigating distinctly dire straits right now.

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Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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