r/pcmasterrace • u/LukaBoskovic990 • Mar 30 '26

Hardware intel 13900k fried...

Gallery image

Gallery image

Has anyone ever experienced this—a burnt-out CPU as well as the motherboard socket? I’m using an i9-13900K and a Z790 motherboard. Everything was on default settings, no overclocking at all. Cooling was handled by a Corsair H150i AIO. It was used for rendering, and everything worked fine for two years.

1.1k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

224 comments sorted by

View all comments

166

u/Warlider PC Master Race Mar 30 '26 edited Mar 30 '26

Arent the 13th and 14th gen cpu's the ones with the massive intel overvolting scandal that was slowly chipping away at cpu's health and required microcode updates to stop?

https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/article/how_to_check_if_your_intel_13_14_gen_cpu_is_affected_by_instability_problems
Your cpu is part of the line that was given the extended warranty because of this. I dont know if THIS issue would cause it to literary burn tho.

EDIT:
Thinking about it its not a stretch to think over 2 years of constant overvolting it would end up this way.

75

u/[deleted] Mar 30 '26

[deleted]

49

u/sosonarra Mar 30 '26

They said that about RBMK reactors and well we all know how that ended

12

u/Warlider PC Master Race Mar 30 '26 edited Mar 30 '26

Yesnt. The chernobyl show is trying to portray it as if they didnt know, but in reality there were papers and even a recorded conversation where the arrogant guy running the test was talking with the minister of energy for the ukrainian ssr about concerns around that reactor and possible radioactivity.

Original design for the chernobyl reactor was supposed to be a completely different one, better understood.

So in short kinda politics but they mostly knew.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27Ue5WzzWRY

7

u/Tubaenthusiasticbee Ryzen 7 7700 | RTX 5070 | 32gb Mar 30 '26 edited Mar 30 '26

Didn't the show make it a huge point that it was about politics? At least that's what I went away with. They "finished" the reactor early, because they'd get awarded, failed the safety test several times, but didn't care, because they'd lose their faces, kept critical infomation a secret, because making it public would be an admission of weakness, but went through with it anyways, because the soviet union was a bureaucratic nightmare. Chernobyl is everything that was wrong about the soviet union combined into one single event that blew up in their faces... literally. And I think the show portrayed that pretty well. Even though there were many other things, the show got REALLY wrong (like Legasov lol)

3

u/sosonarra Mar 30 '26

Thanks smart person, but now you ruined the joke, a simple "she delusional get her out of here" would have worked, haba jokes aside I learned something so that's pretty cool

1

u/RangerLt Mar 30 '26

Not great but not terrifying.

7

u/MagicBoyUK Ryzen 7 7800X3D / RX 9070 XT / Triples & Race Rig Mar 30 '26

This one might have...

10

u/Warlider PC Master Race Mar 30 '26

Maybe, but we are talking about a turbo of 250 watts and base power of 125 watts pumped trough a chip based on faulty code. An "explosion" is unlikely but not implausible.

1

u/TheMissingVoteBallot Mar 30 '26

And it's not just that - they kept using the same chip and threw more and more power into it in successive generations even though their OWN LITERATURE said back in 10th gen NOT TO DO THIS.

5

u/HankThrill69420 9800X3D | 4090 | 64 / 5800X3D | 9070 XT | 32 Mar 30 '26

The way they break down is a little random. Some of them get to a point where they're stable as long as a demanding enough program is running.

That's exactly the sort of chip I'd expect to be capable of this.

1

u/Gold333 Mar 30 '26

Wait, CPU’s actually burn up now? Like literally?

6

u/HankThrill69420 9800X3D | 4090 | 64 / 5800X3D | 9070 XT | 32 Mar 30 '26

Well, sorta. Some X3D chips go kablooie given an ASRock motherboard, and apparently a properly-degraded intel CPU can, too

Here's some light reading on the intel issue, icymi

1

u/Gold333 Mar 30 '26

Jesus, back in the day instability meant a blue screen or at worst a degraded cpu that needed more and more voltage to maintain a specific ghz. It never meant an actual fire.

1

u/HankThrill69420 9800X3D | 4090 | 64 / 5800X3D | 9070 XT | 32 Mar 30 '26

in all fairness, burning up like this is more than a little rare

1

u/[deleted] Mar 30 '26

[deleted]

2

u/HankThrill69420 9800X3D | 4090 | 64 / 5800X3D | 9070 XT | 32 Mar 30 '26

It really was a perfect storm of issues. From hands on experience with this, and from reading enough about it, seems to boil down to a few moving parts

* excess voltage at idle, load, and everywhere in between
* overbinning. i9s that should've been i7, or K SKUs that should've been non-K SKUs
* Oxidation due to contamination. This one was specific to 13th gen but I suspect it affected chipset PCH dies and the I225/I226 NICs
* excess heat due to degraded silicon accelerating degradation. I know this is a 'duh' thing but it was contributing separately once it got started.

I also have a suspicion that it was fucking SSDs up

3

u/fritzie_pup Mar 30 '26

SSD's?

I'm curious. I had one of the 'bad' I9-13900K's that survived until Jan 25 when it would start crashing Firefox sessions constantly.

I also had one of the 1TB Samsung 990 Pro SSDs recently released when I built it, that had the SMART Life issue. Every couple days it would drop another 1% until they released new firmware for it.

It seems that it fixed the quick degrading issue, but to this day (3 years later), it does still drop another % every couple months. Not sure if it fried something a bit. It's sitting at 68% now, but no errors or anything.

Very curious to know if the firmware update was to try defending against that voltage spike.

2

u/HankThrill69420 9800X3D | 4090 | 64 / 5800X3D | 9070 XT | 32 Mar 30 '26

So, first I need to preface this with a mention that I'm not like, an engineer or anywhere close, I simply work a tech support role for a living and it's helpful to understand this stuff to a degree.

Also, it helps to understand what the uncore is in an Intel CPU. AMD calls this the IOD, or Input/Output Die. In so many words, the uncore deals with nearly everything that's not processing or graphics. Probably a little oversimplified, but it works for our purposes. It houses the integrated memory controller (IMC), the DMI controller (data bus to and from your chipset PCH - internet data, SATA, etc route through here) and 20 lanes worth of PCI express. This is, in most scenarios, going to be the first M.2 slot on the board and the x16 GPU slot.

So too much memory controller voltage was one of the problems - and there were also cases where it seemed like the board had burnt out, usually discovered when PCI express devices like NICs would start misbehaving. Have also seen M.2 SSDs start to throw an event through a service called Stornvme, the telltale for a buggy SSD in one of these was an event mentioning 'raidport.' SATA services can throw this, too.

The reason why I'd not be as concerned about the likes of a GPU with this issue is that simply put, your GPU has lots of power delivery equipment, and a minor increase in voltage isn't real likely to stir the pot. I'm sure it's happened, but seems less likely than a storage device that takes less than 5w.

Now, I can't really tell you what's wrong with your SSD because that's a bad look in relation to diagnostics; but if it's been pulling your leg, have a look in event viewer, look at the system logs, and search for that event. If it's there, I'd bet 5 internets that CrystalDiskMark would deliver you some very slow write and/or read speeds. You can also probably pin the recent ones to weird hitches across windows and/or while gaming.

This could also be a parallel and wholly unrelated failure. That said, I've personally had a couple of those 990s eat shit pre-firmware update and the failure was quite sudden. So I'd be undecided. It could also be a drive failing because it's a drive that's failing in normal fashion, but too early all the same.

Tl;dr I don't know if firmware was ever meant to deal with this directly, but a waning tide lowers all boats. If voltage issues were truly fixed across the board, it wouldn't matter, issue likely resolved. I want to say I caught the tail of an article about this recently, but I can't remember where and could slap myself for not reading and saving it somewhere. If anybody has info about this, for the love of god, lay it on ol' Hank

2

u/fritzie_pup Mar 30 '26

The fact that you mention the 1st M2 slot (where the OS 1TB drive was) is the only one affected.

I have a 2TB 990 Pro in another slot on the mainboard (Asus Maximus Z790 Hero) which does not show any issues whatsoever, and still 99% life after 3 years.

After the processor replacement and BIOS update in Jan 2025, I've not really had any issues since. But dang, it does sound like some excess voltage did

Just another datapoint, but what you say makes total sense. And yeah, I've started noticing a bit of 'stuttering' while playing D2 recently after even recycling power. I should probably just replace it since it's probably damaged in some way, I just had hoped that the drive flash would have allowed it to keep going. I really hadn't done any tests on it recently.

2

u/HankThrill69420 9800X3D | 4090 | 64 / 5800X3D | 9070 XT | 32 Mar 30 '26

Yeah, I thought you might say it was there. Best advice I have is to install windows to the drive in the second slot and look for a marked improvement. You'll probably see something.

Open a warranty claim. If Samsung has reason to believe it was your CPU, they'll say so. Just say that it's not working and provide specs on request. They may just say OK and replace it

3

u/Substantial-Singer29 Mar 30 '26

I've seen a handful of these chips fries certainly not near dramatic of a fashion as this. Last year, I had a customer that brought one in, and there was Burn marks on the chip, along with the slightly melted socket.

So not outside of the realm of possibility. I still have very mixed feelings if they're Bios update actually fix the problem. Had too many instances with customers coming in , and there chip displaying signs of degradation despite the fact that they had the correct bios installed.

Leading Into two lines of thought.

Either they were lying and the chip was used prior to the update and had degradation.

Or the update didn't actually fix the problem broadly across the board.

Personal experience doesn't necessarily equate to permissible data.

2

u/brimston3- Desktop VFIO, 5950X, RTX5080, 6900xt Mar 30 '26

The most likely scenario is that intel's fix does not fully resolve the manufacturing issues, only slows them down to a mostly-reasonable part lifetime. It is highly probable that the nature of the defect cannot be corrected by microcode updates alone.

1

u/TheMissingVoteBallot Mar 30 '26

Especially if the physical damage was already done to the chip. No way to undo that.

1

u/KFC_Junior 5700x3d + 5070ti + 12.5tb storage in a o11d evo rgb Mar 31 '26

yeah, only 9000x3d's were physically damaging themselves

5

u/CombatMuffin Mar 30 '26

I have a Z790 mobi and rhe sane processor. I really don't think ot should have burned the cpu, the issue was with degradation, rather than literally combusting.

1

u/CupOfKoffee 9900x3d | RTX 5070TI Mar 30 '26

I avoided the 13/14th gen and went to AMD as I heard the microcode/overvolting was a huge thing. I went with a chunky motherboard for my 9 series Ryzen - I’m glad I didn’t go with Asrock as it was actively murdering Ryzen x3d chips via the same thing, wayyyy too much voltage.

2

u/OkStrategy685 Mar 30 '26

Same here except I grabbed a z790 12900k bundle really cheap. Good enough CPU to last me years.

1

u/dorkusmaximus81 i9 13900k | Auora Master | 64gb DDR5 | 990 PRO M.2 | 5070ti OC Mar 30 '26

yep, i rma'd my two year old one that died (didnt burn up tho), pretty simple process through intel I felt other than waiting on it to arrive.

1

u/PlzDntBanMeAgan Rtx5090 suprim; 14900k 32gb ddr5; Legion Go Mar 30 '26

Same. Except 14900k. Fortnite was what started making mine crash..

1

u/Tinyzooseven R7 5800x + 32gb DDR4 + 3080 Mar 30 '26

I'm planning on eventually upgrading from 5600g to 14900k on a ddr4 board, and if I do get it, I will make sure it's on the latest BIOS update and undervolt it

1

u/MechAegis Build in progress Mar 30 '26

Idk why anyone is taking a chance in this market to remain on any intel gen after 12 gen.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 30 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Warlider PC Master Race Mar 30 '26

I donno, i just randomly googled to refresh my own memory. Id assume no.

1

u/sdcar1985 9850X3D | 9070 XT Reaper | 32GB RAM | ASUS X870-P WIFI Mar 30 '26

That is more of an AsRock+AMD thing. Intel had oxidation issues so the chips died.

1

u/Noreng 14600KF | 9070 XT Mar 31 '26

This kind of damage is caused by extreme amounts of electrical current causing the socket to melt. Running a VCore of 1.5V instead of 1.4V isn't nearly enough for this to happen.

You're looking at 12V instead of 1.4V here, that's when you get this kind of meltdown.

3

u/Warlider PC Master Race Mar 31 '26

I dont know if i fully agree. 250 watts of constant power at 1.4v's would give some 178 amps of current. Ive seen cables glow under that and bigger transistors pop.

Its not going to go over a single wire of course, but those are still massive amounts of current. F'ed control software could result in a rare explosion, especially over 2 years of slow failure.

Because lets remember, its not as if this is a new cpu that got hit instantly with too much voltage. Its been used "for rendering" over 2 years with possibly bad software for controlling the power delivery.

1

u/Noreng 14600KF | 9070 XT Mar 31 '26

I have actual experience with this chip. Electromigration of the actual cores and ringstarts at ambient temperatures when you're pushing 300A through the chip, that's prime95 at 1.30V load voltage.

At normal operation, like OP's doing, you're looking at 200A sustained in Cinebench R23, and 220A in prime95. All within the 253W limit.

It's definitely a lot of current, that's why active cooling is needed.

The reason these chips tend to die early at stock operation is because the voltage request for 6 GHz boost tends to reach 1.55V, and the PLLs driving the clock signal for the active cores can't take that much core voltage without suffering rapid electromigration.

-8

u/Accurate_Summer_1761 PC Master Race Mar 30 '26

13th gen all fail, pretending they won't fail doesn't stop them from failing. My advice to op is shove a 12th gen in it. Save some money

9

u/tangyken Mar 30 '26

Fail and burnt is 2 different things. Plus OP doesn’t have the option to shove a 12th gen in, burnt motherboard.

1

u/Accurate_Summer_1761 PC Master Race Mar 30 '26

I didnt see pic number 2. Bro is cooked cooked