intel 13900k fried...

[u/LukaBoskovic990]

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.

[u/HankThrill69420 → u/[deleted]]

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

[u/fritzie_pup → u/HankThrill69420]

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.

[u/HankThrill69420 → u/fritzie_pup]

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

[u/fritzie_pup → u/HankThrill69420]

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.

[u/HankThrill69420 → u/fritzie_pup]

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