Intel faces lawsuit over Raptor Lake gaming CPU instability issues

Intel is being sued in California over 13th and 14th gen Intel Core CPUs that can be irreparably damaged by voltage instability issues.

The trouble for Intel over Raptor Lake instability issues isn’t over yet. A new lawsuit has just been filed in the state of California by an unlucky Intel Core i7 13700K owner which was affected by the Vmin Shift Instability problems that have plagued anyone with a 13th and 14th gen Intel Core gaming CPU.

This tops off a very difficult year for Intel which, along with Raptor Lake problems, has seen the company unsuccessfully attempt to beat AMD into launching the best gaming CPU of current times. Just this week, AMD launched the brand new flagship Ryzen 7 9800X3D that happily stomps all over Intel’s next and best Intel Arrow Lake CPUs, further adding to the misery.

It looks like that misery is being extended to the court room, too. Mark Vanvalkenburgh, the lawsuit plaintiff, says that he bought an Intel Core i7 13700K from a Best Buy back in 2023, and he wasn’t aware of the instability issues at the time. He said that his own PC suffered from random blackouts, restarts, and freezes. Applying Intel Raptor Lake CPU fixes weren’t enough to fix the problem, which would suggest that his own CPU had already been irreparably damaged by the fault.

The Vmin Shift Instability issue that Vanvalkenburgh and other Raptor Lake CPU owners have faced is caused by a fault in the clock tree circuit in the Intel Architecture cores (i.e. the CPU cores), which sees “reliability aging” issues when the CPU sees higher temperatures and voltages. Intel only recently identified the four main causes behind the problem and released a final Raptor Lake CPU fix after several earlier patches to mitigate the issue.

After two years of crashing CPUs and consumer complaints, it’s safe to say that this lawsuit isn’t an entirely unexpected outcome. For Vanvalkenburgh, attempts by Intel to mitigate the issue are too little, too late. His own CPU has irreparable damage, and he didn’t consider a replacement adequate as the CPU was (arguably) faulty in the first place, so he’s bringing the suit to seek compensation from Intel for himself and others as a result.

The lawsuit references a number of media reports about the instability, dating back before he bought the CPU, insinuating that Intel was aware of the problem long before it released a potential Intel CPU fix earlier this year. Vanvalkenburgh is hoping that this into a class action, with law firm Dovel & Luner expecting other Intel customers to join the cause.

Thankfully, Intel’s latest CPUs aren’t affected by the Vmin Shift Instability issues, but the reception that the company was probably hoping for with these chips hasn’t come to pass. Check out our Intel Core Ultra 7 265K review next to find out why that is and why, if you’re planning on a new gaming PC build, it’s probably worth picking up an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D or 7800X3D instead.