Intel’s higher-end Core i9 processors are increasingly running into kernel-level bugs, leading to system crashes and BSODs. We reported on this issue earlier after the Core i9-13900KF in our primary testbench faced similar problems. A 14th Gen Core i7-14700K purchased recently by one of my colleagues suffered from a related bug. It ran all graphics cards in PCIe Gen 4 x2 mode (regardless of the generation), a symptom of a faulty PCIe bus.
Content creator ChamberTech is facing similar BSODs with his newly bought Core i9-14900KS. One of the error codes for the crash is “PAGE-FAULT-IN-NONPAGED_AREA,” often reported in times of memory corruption, memory bus defects, and PCIe lane irregularities. It is hard to pinpoint the underlying cause for these crashes, but it almost certainly has to do with the memory, memory controllers, or the PCIe bus.
In our case, it was the PCIe bus, as the crashes were only observed in gaming and other 3D workloads leveraging the discrete GPU. If you face similar issues in CPU-intensive tasks like rendering or compression/decompression, it might be a case of memory corruption or memory DIMM/controller defect. We’ll update this story as we get more updates.
Dragon’s Dogma 2 Performance Benchmark – PC Optimized Settings