If you happen to’ve been maintaining with tech information for the previous couple of months, you’ve nearly actually heard concerning the flaws affecting Intel Thirteenth- and 14th-gen desktop CPUs. You would possibly’ve additionally heard that Intel’s fixing them — or at the very least attempting to mitigate future CPU failures.
In the present day, the primary motherboard BIOS updates with fixes for Intel’s crashing CPUs are rolling out, from each Asus and MSI.
Intel’s repair is definitely a microcode patch utilized to the Raptor Lake-series processors to repair voltage errors. The patch is utilized utilizing motherboard UEFI-BIOS as a supply technique.
MSI’s varied high-end Z790 motherboards within the MAG, MEG, and MPG sequence are getting the patch proper now (noticed by PCGamer), with different 700-series and 600-series motherboards being patched “within the coming weeks by the tip of August.”
Asus is following swimsuit, however doing so in its typical method of posting Google Drive file hyperlinks for beta updates on its official ROG boards. Up to now, the updates are coming to Z790 boards within the Strix and Maximus classes, plus the Z790-AYW OC WIFI and ProArt Z790-Creator WiFi. Presumably, the BIOS recordsdata shall be out there as commonplace downloads after the discussion board posters get a while beta testing it.
Notice that these BIOS recordsdata embrace the “official” repair for the issue straight from Intel, and shouldn’t be confused with earlier makes an attempt by PC producers to mitigate injury by resetting manufacturing facility overclocks on “gaming” motherboards to default settings.
The hope is that the voltage adjustment within the microcode will forestall at present working processors from future injury, however the repair is unlikely to reverse any injury already inflicted to crashing CPUs. As such, different OEMs are possible scrambling to get the Intel repair utilized to their very own motherboards as shortly as attainable to save lots of their clients plenty of complications (to not point out money and time in assist and RMAs).
If you happen to’ve already been affected by a crashing CPU, you would possibly wish to look into Intel’s newly-expanded warranties that ought to cowl all of the Raptor Lake processors at present in consumer machines.