I've been seeing a lot of posts about people's experiences with the i9-14900k's and Intel's overall RMA experience since these chips seem to require quite a few of them, so I thought I would post my own experience for any potential buyers.

I got my 14900k back in December as a promotional bundle item (mobo + CPU + RAM) from Microcenter, and it was working pretty well until it started to progressively fail in mid February. During CPU intensive tasks (rendering video, any sort of stress test and eventually even playing some video games) my computer would crash and shut down regularly. When I ran the stress tests in Intel's extreme tuning utility, the CPU was constantly being thermal throttled, despite stock settings and an NH-D15 heatsink.

In any case, it was too late to return it to Microcenter since it had been more than 1 month so I made a ticket with Intel's support team. They were pretty quick in getting back to me initially, and a week or so later I had a call with one of their technicians. We ran through a bunch of troubleshooting steps (prior to the call I had already reseated the CPU twice, reapplied thermal paste etc) and he determined that the CPU itself was faulty, so I was eligible for an RMA.

I was told that I can either wait 3-6 months for a replacement CPU (or longer...) directly from Intel, or I can accept a cash refund which they could send to me in a few days to rebuy the CPU myself. The only issue is that the promotional pricing from the CPU/mobo/RAM bundle that I originally bought was no longer available, and buying a brand new 14900k would cost about $100 more. I talked to their service rep about it on the phone and he said that Intel would try to cover it.

Intel then took about 1 month to come to a conclusion on this, and the rep I was in contact with would simply not respond to me for days unless I prompted him to. I even had to call their service rep line to talk to a DIFFERENT representative who got in contact with him, and only then he provided me an update on my case status. In addition, I had to submit the same information several times to the same rep.

Well, in the end they refused to. I know that technically they are right, Intel only needs to reimburse me for the total cost of the CPU present on the invoice I had from Microcenter. But by putting me in a position where I need to wait 3 or more months for a warranty replacement or accept a refund for less money than it would cost to rebuy the CPU itself, it seemed like I was forced to pay $100 for an "expedited" warranty service.

After this experience, I really regret choosing Intel as my CPU for this build. The new 14900k I have works just fine, and I have a 360mm AIO for it now and have ensured that the power limit is throttled to 253W (Intel's designed max) since this one came with an unlocked power limit for whatever reason. But if I were to ever have to issue another warranty claim for this CPU again, which is definitely possible considering the amount of issues this generation has had, I'm not looking forward to seeing what will happen next time.

Maybe I just got a bad rep as other people seem to have vastly different experiences than mine, but because of this I will not be choosing Intel again for any new build I'll be making.

Hi, my 13700K has started acting up and I was considering RMA'ing it but I was curious how people's experiences went. Stuff like how easy was it, what CPU did you send in, what did Intel send back, how long it took, etc.

Thanks.

So, im thinking about doing a rma for my cpu but i bought a prebuilt from micro center, so would they replace it?(its under warranty still) or would i have to go to intel?