[teeheelol]

I hear a lot of anecdotes and noise from YouTubers around this but little to no actual data or analysis. I am a skeptic until I see concrete data. That covers both the mobile and desktop issues.

Observations so far are limited to:

I have seen actual evidence that some W680 boards have been shipping with an unlimited power profile which will toast a CPU fairly quickly. As to who’s fault that is and if this correlates or is casual to the rest of the reports I don’t know.

My own Asus B760M board shipped with an unlimited power profile. I had to switch it to “Intel Default”. This machine has been under heavy load with no issues so far.

When I have done research I have only found people reporting this on custom build systems or low balling “servers”. I haven’t found any viable big brand system failure reports yet (Dell/HP/Lenovo etc). While some of this might be statistical failures I’d like to see configuration eliminated from the data as a cause first.

I think it would be rather nice at this point if Intel produced their own desktop boards again with their own tested BIOS. So we have something viable to compare against a reference system rather than the usual ugly junk shifter outfits or big brands. A fully vertically integrated component PC would be a nice thing to have again. They just worked!

[fotcorn]

Gamers Nexus is talking to one big PC manufacturer (my guess is Dell) that is seeing failure rates of 10-25% for specific SKUs: https://youtu.be/gTeubeCIwRw?t=527&si=YzpDzI2IyadzQYid

Not fully confirmed yet, but that sounds really bad. It seems like it also hits low power models like the 13900T, which would imply this isn't just a voltage issue from auto overclocking.

[teeheelol]

Yeah this is still second hand information though and there isn’t any data still. There may be confounding factors.

Lots of speculation that is all.

Someone (at intel) needs to get an incident management process around this and start doing some proper comms.

[Thaxll]

For sure they already have a team working on it for month. I think it's that bad that they don't talk about it yet.

[teeheelol]

Corporates have learned not to say anything about stuff because it turns into YT influencer fuel rather than rational analysis.

[szundi]

We can only get second hand info

[teeheelol]

YT influencers can publish their sources and data.

[hulitu]

This is like saying politicians can publish their lobbyists.

[ssl-3]

I miss the days of Intel desktop boards.

They were boring in every single way: They weren't flashy, they weren't expensive, they didn't have weird features, and they were ridiculously stable.

I didn't ever buy any of them for myself because I like to tinker with stuff, but I sold a bunch of them to people who simply wanted a computer that just worked.

[solardev]

Is it normal for configuration to be able to override hardware thermal protections?

[immibis]

If the target market is overclockers. They want to be able to override everything for a high score if they want to. My board (ASUS TRX50) has all kinds of override settings for fan speeds, voltages, TDP (whatever that does!) and a warning not to mess with them if you don't know what you're doing.

[teeheelol]

Yes unfortunately. When you buy "enthusiast boards" which is everything that Dell and HP etc don't ship these days then you have literally no idea what crappy BIOS and software configuration you are inheriting.

[paulmd]

yes, even W680 can override power and thermal limits, voltage, current excursion protection, etc. Everything except clock multiplier.

https://youtu.be/5KHCLBqRrnY?t=2694

that is part of the problem, W680 is not the same thing as C266 (and even C266 might be able to do it, wendell is sounding concerned about E-2400 platform too). W680 is still a consumer-socket product, it's just one that supports ECC. Like yes, people run those in a datacenter and that's fine and normal and supported - some customers want high single-threaded performance, and the big server chips just aren't as good at that. One of the affected customers is Citadel, which is unsurprising if you think about it (HFT).

this also means you get fun stuff like 13700T sometimes being run without power limits... but even within power limits they've seen 13700T degrading too, which is kind of a point against the whole "their hubris and power consumption angered the gods" thesis. If 35W is too much power, we're all cooked.

But it's hard to say, since nothing is being run within-spec and you have to bend over backwards to get "stock" behavior etc. Which buildzoid has elaborated and clarified on (after a couple initial videos that were working from incomplete info). And like yeah, that's a whole shitshow too... not only were partners severely breaking the spec in a whole bunch of places, both in the sense of departing further from the spec in ways that could cause problems, and also performing a factory undervolt out-of-the-box that isn't necessarily stable, and this has gotten more and more out-of-spec over time too (both the undervolting and loadline). Also, the "intel baseline profile" and "intel failsafe profile" apparently did not come from Intel, those were made up by gigabyte and msi, while the Intel Default profile did. Great stuff, you love to see it. /s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUzbNNhECp4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6pUZs_tuJo

But there just has to be a reason that only 10-25% of samples are affected and if it's just generically power or current you should see it everywhere. Hence why board config is/was a concern, and why GN is now kinda pointing the finger at this "contamination/oxidation of the vias" fab problem theory.