“Clearly damaged” is an interesting problem. The CPU would crash 100% of the time on the default settings for the motherboard, but if you remember, they issued a patch already.

I patched. And guess what, with the new Intel Defaults it doesn’t crash anymore. But it suddenly runs very hot instead. Like, weird hot. On a liquid cooling system it’s thermal throttling when before it wouldn’t come even close. Won’t crash, though.

So is it human error? Did I incorrectly mount my cooling? I’d say probably not, considering it ran cool enough pre-patch until it became unstable and it runs cool enough now with a manual downclock. But is that enough for Intel to issue a replacement if the system isn’t unstable? More importantly, do I want to have that fight with them now or to wait and see if their upcoming patch, which allegedly will fix whatever incorrect voltage requests the CPU is making, fixes the overheating issue? Because I work on this thing, I can’t just chuck it in a box, send it to Intel and wait. I need to be up and running immediately.

So yeah, it sucks either way, but it would suck a lot less if Intel was willing to flag a range of CPUs as being eligible for a recall.

As I see it right now, the order of operations is to wait for the upcoming patch, retest the default settings after the patch and if the behavior seems incorrect contact Intel for a replacement. I just wish they would make it clearer what that process is going to be and who is eligible for one.