Phantom of the Opera CPUs Unmasked

Zak Storey explores why Zen 4 might be the best CPU generation to date

- Zak Storey

LET’S FACE IT, this industry isn’t exactly one that has avoided controversy over the years. The PC enthusiast landscape has always been riddled with, let’s call them, issues. In fact, right now, we’re witnessing one of those very moments rising up again, and most notably, that comes in the form of Intel’s hiccups (putting it politely) with its 14th and 13th generation of processors. The TL;DR is that the manufacturing process in the 13th generation chips potentially led to oxidization across certain transistor gates, leading to CPU malfunction, and the 14th gen’s micro-code, under extreme load and voltages would actively cause the chip to deteriorate with no hope of recovery once the damage had been done. All of this only came to light after extensive investigations by some seriously admirable media and B2B partners (thank you, Gamer’s Nexus).

Intel has aggressively pursued micro-code tweaks since the first acknowledgement of its 14th-gen stability faux pas, and as such, the chips themselves ‘should’ be more stable, and less likely to commit seppuku on themselves under heavy loads. That said, it’s not quite done yet, and we’re still expecting a BIOS tweak in the coming weeks. If your 14th-gen chip is having problems, please get in touch with Intel’s customer support directly, and they should be able to help you out.

As we’ve already had one major round of BIOS updates, forcing motherboards into an ‘Intel recommended’ voltage config, and with micro-code updates landing in just two weeks time, we’ve decided to do a two-parter this month: one build comparing Intel’s current 14thgen state against Ryzen 7th gen under these new parameters, and one build next month, still comparing the same 14th-gen build, but now with the new micro-code changes, with Ryzen 9000 as our feature build as well.