Aurora R16, new, every game crashes

I think this is unfortunately the side effect of the race between Intel and AMD to have the fastest gaming processor.

I personally think Intel pushed the latest few generations out with a bit of a too optimistic boosting algorithm causing stability issues and crashes.

That is my personal opinion based on what I am reading on the Internet about this. Intel is pointing towards motherboard manufacturers but I don't think that is totally fair.

Time will tell what is going to happen.

@DELL-Chris M​ Just wanted to comment that this workaround appears to have worked for me. Keeping my fingers crossed.

I have one of the first R16, and it has been a nightmare, to say the least. I also have an R13 and an R15, each with the I9 and RTX 3080 on the R13, an RTX 3090 on the R15, and an RTX4090 on the 16. Each has the fastest RAM available and 64, and 4th gen NVMe on the first two, and 5th gen NVMe on the R16. The R16 is by far the slowest to boot and slowest to shut down. I have had two motherboards go bad. The 2nd RAM socket on the R16 was the issue. The R16 has always been the noisiest, and with the last motherboard fix, the fan runs almost constantly, including at idle and with any GPU load. I do my F1 racing now on my R15 because it actually works.  I turned the ECC on the RTX 4090 on, and the fan speed is so high you can't hear. The GPU and CPU are set to balanced. Any thoughts?

P.S. I have the latest BIOS and did nothing to stabilize the system, and I forgot to say the R16 hangs a lot, a very lot.

Started to have this issue too. Game crashes. Browser pages crashing. Is Dell going to replace these cpus? 

@Theloto​   to my knowledge Intel has not made any design changes to the 13th & 14th Gen processors, so there would be no point in replacing with another potential faulty CPU. This is on Intel to resolve.

Some good news as of 07/23/2024:

Intel says it has found the issue causing 13th and 14th Gen CPUs to crash (msn.com)

May not see a Dell update for a few weeks, but hopefully this will manage to resolve the crashes.

@Jelloman581​ Don't know if that is good or bad news:

The bug causes irreversible degradation of the impacted processors. We're told that the microcode patch will not repair processors already experiencing crashes, but it is expected to prevent issues on processors that aren't currently impacted by the issue. For now, it is unclear if CPUs exposed to excessive voltage have suffered from invisible degradation or damage that hasn't resulted in crashes yet but could lead to errors or crashes in the future.

Intel advises all customers having issues to seek help from its customer support. Because the microcode update will not repair impacted processors, the company will continue to replace them. Intel has pledged to grant RMAs to all impacted customers.

link

Since these are OEM CPU's you would have to RMA with the OEM, but it will be very difficult to determine if your processor has been damaged or not from these high voltage spikes.

I see a big mess ahead because this can get costly fast...

My own experiences here seem broadly to mirror others... What I have found is that the system is extremely stable (and pretty fast) with latest available (2.9.0) BIOS, latest NVidia drivers (560.81), and all other available updates done, so long as I am in "Balanced" mode. I haven't done any tweaks in BIOS - all BIOS settings left at default.

If however I use "Performance" mode, the thing is about as stable as a 2-legged table in an earthquake.

My solution - run everything in Balanced mode - performance is good, and it's rock solid.

Will be interesting to see if this new (as yet unavailable) BIOS update resolves the Performance mode stability issue, but I'm actually pretty happy with Balanced mode performance and stability.

Nightmare for me. It's really wrecked my ability to play anything, even bios updates/changes and "balanced" mode and such. Sometimes I have a good day, other days nothing is playable. I've got customer support working on it. They gathered some info from my system and promised to reach back out in a couple days with next steps.  I realize there's not much more they can really do at this instant, but I am one extremely unhappy customer.  

Is Dell extending warranties on these <Profanity is never allowed on our Forum. DELL-Admin> machines? Are they offering refunds?

Just as a follow-up, I installed BIOS 2.10.1 on Friday, tested on Balanced mode to make sure nothing was broken and it's still as solid as before, but in Performance mode it is still unstable. I reached out to support and they did a remote session, grabbed some logs, and said they'd get back to me in 2-3 days...

Just realized I didn't close my story out... so after continuing to see issues after the BIOS upgrade, I updated the case I had open with Dell. After a bit more back and forth, Dell sent a technician out and they changed the CPU. Since then the system has been rock solid, even in Performance mode.

@JohnDotKay​ This is the same resolve I had. Nothing worked until they came out and swapped the CPU and it's been 100% ever since.