Sean Hollister

Intel recently informed us that the impacted 13th and 14th generation processors facing instability issues will have an extended warranty. Dell will support Intel’s extended warranty terms for a total of five-years on these processors.

Pretty much every brand is on board now, save Lenovo and Acer:

The company’s answer was brief:

MSI will cover 2 year extended warranty on all MSI Desktop. 

We asked all its competitors the same question about Intel’s crashing chips. Here are the answers:

The number-one PC maker has answered our question whether it’ll honor Intel’s two-year extended warranty on damaged chips — but the answer doesn’t even include the word “warranty.”

Lenovo has been made aware of the instability issue affecting Intel’s 13th and 14th Generation Processors and is working with Intel to understand the potential impact on our products and how to best resolve them. We will work toward integrating into our future product BIOS any fixes provided by Intel once available. We recommend customers impacted by any CPU instability issues to contact Lenovo service for support.

Intel is footing the bill for replacements; this shouldn’t be a hard decision for Lenovo.

It now offers a five-year warranty on Intel’s problematic 13th and 14th Gen CPUs, just like its closest competitors.

We also got a vague new statement from Dell/Alienware that suggests it might extend its own parts warranty, but doesn’t promise to do so.

Falcon Northwest CEO Kelt Reeves tells The Verge:

Please help us get the word out to all Raptor Lake desktop users, especially i9 users, in big screaming headlines that they need to update their PC to the latest BIOS now to stop/prevent the CPU wear and hopefully avoid the need for an RMA. Don’t wait for the August microcode – that’s the last 5% (we hope) of the solution, but 95% of the fix is available now. Think of the new BIOS’ as the vaccine against this issue, but it will do no good unless people get shots in arms.

Intel spox Thomas Hannaford wouldn’t go as far as “95% of the fix,” but he says “Kelt’s PSA is a good one”. Besides, the August microcode is rolling out now:

⭕ If you’ve got USB-C on a reference design GPU, you may not need the adapter at all. Some report you can plug the headset right into certain cards once you install the app.

❌ Sony’s dongle doesn’t have Bluetooth; I’ve spent hours trying to get PS VR2 controllers to work well on desktop, despite using a Sony-approved Bluetooth dongle.

OneXPlayer just spilled the beans on the AMD Radeon RX 7800M — cuz it’ll be in its new graphic dock, the OneXGPU2. As Liliputing points out, the last time someone designed a portable eGPU around a Radeon laptop chip, most other boutique handheld makers followed suit.

Big FPS boosts for handhelds when docked, I hear, but quite pricey too.