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Comment by salamo | Hacker News Reader

Is there any info on how to diagnose this problem? Having just put together a computer with the 14900KF, I really don't want to swap it out if not necessary.

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There is no reliable way to diagnose this issue with the 14th gen, the chip slowly degrades over time and you start getting more and more (usually gpu driver under windows) crashes. I believe the easy way might be to run decompression stress tests if I remember correctly from Wendell's (Level1Techs) video.

I highly recommend going into your motherboard right now and manually setting your configurations to the current intel recommendation to prevent it from degrading to the point where you'd need to RMA it. I have a 14900K and it took about 2.5 months before it started going south and it was getting worse by the DAY for me. Intel has closed my RMA ticket since changing the bios settings to very-low-compared-to-what-the-original-is has made the system stable again, so I guess I have a 14900K that isn't a high end chip anymore.

Below are the configs intel provided to me on my RMA ticket that have made my clearly degraded chip stable again:

CEP (Current Excursion Protection)> Enable. eTVB (Enhanced Thermal Velocity boost)> Enable. TVB (Thermal Velocity boost)>Enable. TVB Voltage Optimization> Enable. ICCMAX Unilimited bit>Disable. TjMAX Offset> 0. C-States (Including C1E) >Enable. ICCMAX> 249A. ICCMAX_APP>200A. Power limit 1 (PL1)>125W. Power limit 2 (PL2)>188W

OCCP burn in test with AVX and XMP disabled.

Tbh, XMP is probably the cause of most modern crashes on gaming rigs. It does not guarantee stability. After finding a stable cpu frequency, enable xmp and roll back the memory frequency until you have no errors in occp. The whole thing can be done in 20 minutes and your machine will have 24/7/365 uptime.

This is good advice for overclocking, but how does it help with the 13th/14th Gen issue? The issue is not due to clocks, or at least doesn't appear to be.

Running a full memtest overnight and a day of Prime95 with validation is the traditional way of sussing out instability.

it’s also a terrible stability test these days for the same reasons Wendell talks about with cinebench in his video with Ian (and Ian agrees too). Doesn’t work like 90% of the chip - it’s purely a cache/avx benchmark. You can have a completely unstable frontend and it’ll just work fine because prime95 fits in icache and doesn’t need the decoder, and it’s just vector op, vector op, vector op forever.

You can have a system that’s 24/7 prime95 stable that crashes as soon as you exit out, because it tests so very little of it. That’s actually not uncommon due to the changes in frequency state that happen once the chip idles down… and it’s been this way for more than a decade, speedstep used to be one of the things overclockers would turn off because it posed so many problems vs just a stable constant frequency load.

Prime95 also completely ignores the high-clock domain btw so it can also be completely prime95 stable yet fail completely on a routine task that boosts up! So it’s technically not even a full test of core stability either.

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