RELIABILITY IS KING
Guy Cocker
IT’S BEEN A STRANGE few months in the world of PC building. As you’ll have read in these pages, Intel had been quiet about a crucial flaw that was discovered in its 13th and 14thgen CPUs, a flaw that was so serious, some game developers said it was only a matter of time before all those chips became useless. Intel was fairly quiet on the subject, which resulted in us taking the affected models out of our Blueprint systems at the back of this magazine until we found out more.
Thankfully, Intel has acknowledged the issue, rolling out system updates to at least provide a temporary fix. They’ve also extended the warranty on these chips by two years, allowing users to get a replacement if they experience structural degradation. It’s a bit of peace of mind for me, as I use an i514600K in my main system, but it still feels annoyingly like there’s a ticking time bomb at the center of the desktop PC I use every day for work and gaming. I’ve never updated my motherboard BIOS as many times as I have in the last few months, as Intel rushes microcode fixes to manufacturers, who then roll them out as firmware updates.