Here, too, the ingenuity of the customers is limitless, with which they take advantage of the company’s workload.
Intel may have faced a new problem in connection with the previously recognized and identified error called Vmin Shift Instability, as certain customers ingeniously started to return their perfectly functioning Raptor Lake processors to the company. In two documented cases, it was possible to find a gap in the company’s shield. THE User X named PK1 got back the $599 purchase price of the Core i9-13900K CPU, while the A Reddit user named SomeOrdinary_Indian It got a Core i9-14900K instead of the Core i9-13900K that was submitted.
In both cases, it is true that Intel did not ask for proof that the processors were bad, and according to those involved, this is a good thing because they worked perfectly functionally, in other words, they could not have proved this, so these were complaints not entitled to warranty replacement.
In the background, it could probably be that so many faulty CPUs can run into Intel that the company simply doesn’t have the human resources to check all complaining hardware. Since the defect is basically known and acknowledged, they simply approve exchanges or refunds because they assume that customers would not return defective products.
It looks like the giant company from Santa Clara is wrong about this, and individual users, taking advantage of the high workload caused by the large number of problematic hardware associated with the error, have started to return the flawless CPUs as well. This gives you the opportunity to upgrade for free, since you can get hardware from a generation later, while Intel covers the shipping costs, but the return of the investment can also be a good option for many, because the value of this hardware has been massively reduced on the used market due to the problem typical of the series. .
Intel is also unlikely to change its approach. It is simply still much cheaper to automatically handle the administration of hardware that is not entitled to a warranty replacement by testing each returned product one by one. The latter comes at a very massive cost with a certain failure rate, and there is certainly enough defective hardware that it is not worth taking on.
Source: prohardver.hu
