back to article Intel tacks two years onto Raptor Lake CPU warranty after voltage crash fiasco

Owners of Intel's 13th and 14th Gen Core desktop processors are set to get an extra two years of warranty coverage. Intel on Thursday announced its extended warranty program for its Raptor Lake PC chips on Reddit, increasing the length of its CPU warranty from three to five years. Either the x86 titan expects so-called " …

  1. SuperGeek

    Oxidisation

    "defects with early Raptor Lake batches, which stems from oxidized vias."

    Reminds me of the issues with WD hard drives and oxidised pads for the headstack contacts on their PCB's. Drives would fail to initialize, and appear to have surface or head failure. However, cleaning the headstack contacts with vinegar or an eraser would fire them straight into life. This would have to be repeated every so often. They didn't tin or plate contacts back then, now they do, they no longer suffer.

  2. Conundrum1885

    Useful tip

    Had this once on an Seagate external 2TB drive. Never dropped, never messed with.

    The high speed USB pins evidently went bad, drive was DOA and wouldn't spin or do anything. SO wanted the data back. Checked out cost of (a) sending for recovery or

    (b) having someone take it apart and repair, (a) was £370+, (b) was risky and minimum £120 with no guarantee of success.

    Of course it would be one where the connector is unhelpfully soldered directly to the drive PCB making repair *very* complicated and making (a) unfeasible once I opened it.

    Ended up fixing by plugging a low speed USB micro into the connector via an external USB power bank, this got it working long enough to salvage the data.

    Oddly enough once this was done the original connector worked again as did the three others I'd tried it with and failed.

    Sharing here in case anyone else has this problem, in days of old drives used a USB-mini which was notoriously flaky at the best of times on some laptops and USB ports.

  3. NewModelArmy

    AMD for the Next PC Build ?

    I never really looked into AMD, as i always purchased Intel.

    Reading about this issue on other website forums, it seems that AMD implement a socket for a much longer time than Intel. The AM4 socket is reported to be supported to at least 2025, which gives it a 9 year lifespan.

    Intel, on the other hand, change their sockets every 2 or 3 generations.

    I have an Intel 7th gen, and i can see 9th gen CPUs still available, but they cost more than some of the 12th gen (both i5), depending on where you buy.

    Since AMD have a much better upgrade path, then the current Intel issue has decided for me the next PC build will be AMD.

    1. The Dogs Meevonks Silver badge

      Re: AMD for the Next PC Build ?

      AMD have always supported sockets for longer the 2 generations Intel avg.

      Over the last 24yrs I've built AMD systems for everyone I know, from before AM1 (K7 rings a bell, maybe for the old T-Bird series) through to AM4... No one expected AMD to release new CPU's for AM4 12 months after introducing AM5... But they did.

      AM5 came out in 2022 and is going to be supported for a min of 3 generations. Unless there are some major changes in the pipeline that would force them into a new socket... or as they've done in the past... maybe going AM5+ which would be backwards compatible. Lost count on the systems I built in the past where all I needed was a new MB and could use everything else... and then upgrade CPU later. Makes for a really good value for money upgrade path.

      We won't be getting DDR6 anytime soon. PCI-E 5.0 is only useful for fast storage at the moment as only high end GPU's are saturating the PCI-E 3.0 bandwidth with mid/low end cards still well below it (unless vendors cheap out and only offer PCI-E 4.0 @ x4 speeds like some have done in the past to cut costs... rendering people with PCI-E 3.0 systems with a card that's basically worthless and running at 50% capacity... Quite the scandal a couple of years ago with people on slightly older, but still supported platforms.

      I'm not planning on a new build for another couple of years... the 5800X3D and 6900XT with 32GB of 3600mhz ram is doing just fine still... Might even get a GPU upgrade before I start seeing CPU bottlenecks in gaming.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: AMD for the Next PC Build ?

      Intel are relying on those that 'always buy intel'...

      The boiling power hungry Pentium 4, and Itanium steaming brick suffer from similar issues to what core 13/14 had : the competitors performance was killing them and the only solution they could roll out quickly was to crank up the power consumption and clock rate.

      Rewinding 20 years, intel realised it's missteps with boiling CPUs and invested heavily in the CORE arch. It needs to do the same.

      AMD had had it's share of missteps too, most obvious when running catch up to core. Piledriver was a steaming turd too.

      Upgrade path is excellent with AMD. Other motherboard features you may want ram sockets etc generally out pace the CPU. Although the socket format is usually long lived I would be slightly paranoid of a 9 year old format being around that much longer. With a 5950X I'm in no rush to upgrade for a very, very long time and hence I'm a bit out of the loop as far as hardware picking is concerned.

      1. nintendoeats

        Re: AMD for the Next PC Build ?

        Don't forget

        APX (the failed ISA, not any of the other things they called APX)

        i286

        FDIV

        F00F

        Probably a few others I'm forgetting

    3. Luiz Abdala
      Boffin

      Re: AMD for the Next PC Build ?

      AMD had the AM4 socket ever since 2016, or Athlons (BIOS and chipsets shenanigans aside, you can run an Atlhon on motherboard released for AM4 TODAY). It is bizarre how long they manage to support a socket.

      If you are buying now, go AM5, or Threadripper or whatever, because AM4 is on the way out. Or, yeah, go AM4 if you are on a tight budget. DDR4 memory will be cheap too.

      They are only launching X3D chips on this socket exactly because:

      a) it is a known platform for eons with all the kinks ironed out on the motherboard vendor side, where any defect on the newest 3D-cache CPUs would be easy to find and correct and;

      b) if the new 3D-cache Ryzens failed, the AM5 socket was already available, just in case it marred the socket reputation as impossible to upgrade. Win-win.

      TLDR go for it, pick an AMD board. I don't regret it.

  4. Groo The Wanderer

    I wouldn't buy an Edsel with an extended warranty, either...

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like