14900KF issues

Not too long after I raised this issue a year ago, I found better (not not bulletproof) stability with some later BIOS updates. Still experienced crashes every day or two, but it was better than every hour.

In December, I applied the latest BIOS update in hopes that it might improve that occasional instability, and unfortunately it became significantly worse, to the point where the system crashes with a wide variety of errors by the time it reaches the windows login. I pretty much can't make it to the desktop at this point. Rolling back the BIOS to previous decently working versions has no effect, still pretty much immediately crashing as it loads Windows.

Recalling that warranties were extended on these processors, I entered a support chat with Micro Center to double check, as the nearest store is a good hour's drive away. The support rep told me that my system was out of warranty and that I would need to work with Intel directly for a CPU replacement. When I input my CPU s/n into their support site, however, it immediately stops the process, indicating that it is a tray CPU and that the PC manufacturer is responsible for any warranty claims.

I entered another support chat with Micro Center, detailing all of this again, and the rep expressed confusion that Intel was not able to RMA the processor, and that they would have a support manager call me. Someone did call me, and they too expressed confusion that Intel was not able to work directly with me, but that he would look into it further and call me back. I never got a call back.

Mike - can you clarify what I should be doing to proceed here?

It was 3/2/2024

I brought this PC into a store and they did verify the degraded CPU. The i9-14900KF was replaced with a  i9-14900K. Everything was fine for a few months, and them I started experiencing very intermittent crashes, once a week or so. Screen just goes black and the system restarts, event viewer only indicates that the previous shutdown was unexpected. This became more frequent in the last month or so.

It became at least a daily occurrence as of a week ago, and now it's multiple times (10+) a day, and now I'm seeing the same errors as before: PAGE FAULT IN NONPAGED AREA, SYSTEM SERVICE EXCEPTION, EXCEPTION_ON_INVALID_STACK, and so on.

Given how many times this thing has crashed since I got, I decided to rule out the O/S potentially being pretty fouled up and wiped the partition and reinstalled Windows from scratch. Still getting the same instability and errors.

Is it possible that my CPU was replaced with a second flawed CPU?

I ran memtestx86 and it completed with zero errors.

It's the progressive nature of the problem that feels an awful lot like the previous CPU issue. No issues at first, then very occasional reboots, then daily crashes, then hour plus stretches of basically not getting past the windows login.

I assume some kind of diagnostic identified the CPU issue when it was in for service. Do I have a fresh warranty on the replacement CPU?