More about Intel chip degradation

It is well known that the 13^th and 14^th gen of Intel chips can degrade over time and start behaving weirdly. Some say that the Ultra generation was also somewhat affected. But there were no mentions that earlier generations were also affected, but I think I found such a case.

My work PC had an Intel 9900K. It was quite fast for its time but extremely power-hungry. It worked just fine until I got CrowdStrike. I could be wrong here, but from my memory, all problems started after the domain policy installed CrowdStrike.

My computer started to crash. Normally, my computer crashes once every year or two. But with CrowdStrike, it crashes much faster. In the end, it crashes twice per day. No other changes were made to the computer.

And let me tell you what CrowdStrike does to your computer. It puts a lot of load on the CPU. For example, I checked it on one of the notebooks I had, and the rebuilding medium C# solution on the clean Windows put temperatures around 70C for the CPU. No thermal throttling. And just in case, Windows Defender was on.

As soon as I add this notebook to the Active Directory and get CrowdStrike, the same rebuild will put CPU to 104C and thermal throttling starts with a second or two. Obviously, it takes longer to build the same solution because the CPU has to throttle down its speed. Plus, the notebook will be very loud.

The same thing happened to the 9900K. Obviously, it takes more time to hit the thermal limit because it has water cooling, but it also starts thermal throttling after 10 seconds or so.

To be fair here, further investigation reveals that the water cooler fan speed in the BIOS was set to silent. After I set it to normal speed, the thermal throttling disappeared. Unfortunately, I could not remove CrowdStrike without reinstalling Windows to test it, but I think the picture would be very similar to the notebook I tested before.

Also, to be 100% transparent, I must state that one or two years before I got CrowdStrike, the water cooler failed, and for a day or two the CPU was overheating until I found what had happened and asked IT to replace it. But it worked fine after that for quite some time.

Anyway, shortly after I got CrowdStrike, my computer started to crash. I blamed CrowdStrike, but I think CrowdStrike's contribution was indirect. It just put a lot of useless work on the CPU, and it constantly stays very hot because I constantly compile some projects.

I think I have a case of chip degradation. All chips degrade over time, but it heavily depends on their temperature. Each additional degree considerably speeds up degradation. The 9900K was hot at the beginning, and it looks like a constant load (thanks to CrowdStrike) significantly accelerated the chip degradation.

Pretty much the same as what happened in the 13^th and 14^th generations, but it probably happened because of a bug in the microcode’s thermal management that accelerated it even more.

That said, I must state that there is a possibility that there is something wrong with the motherboard or power supply. I picked them up myself, and they are high-quality from very reputable brands, but anything can happen. But again, the most probable reason for their failure is extreme power consumption and/or heat.

What are the conclusions here? Well, I think that Intel failed here. One way or another, Intel failed to manage the thermal package correctly, which led to accelerated chip degradation. They didn’t have enough experience managing such a hot CPU and didn’t have any data about chip degradation in this case, but they still decided to risk it.

The second conclusion shows how bad CrowdStrike is. It greatly increases the power consumption of the computer. It greatly increases the CPU usage, making the computer loud without any benefits. And just in case, the electricity price during super peak time in the place I live is close to $1 per kilowatt. So it costs the company a lot of money.

I hope it helps someone.