> Are they "defective" or merely not capable of running the out of spec settings used by many motherboards?
I'd wager good money on the latter. Why would Intel validate their CPUs against power and current limits that are outside of spec? The users reporting issues probably have CPUs that just made it in to the performance envelope to be binned as a 13900K, so running out of spec settings on these weaker chips results in instability.
It's cases like this where I wish Intel didn't exit the motherboard space, they were known to be reliable but typically at the cost of having a more limited feature set.
I'd wager good money on the latter. Why would Intel validate their CPUs against power and current limits that are outside of spec? The users reporting issues probably have CPUs that just made it in to the performance envelope to be binned as a 13900K, so running out of spec settings on these weaker chips results in instability.
It's cases like this where I wish Intel didn't exit the motherboard space, they were known to be reliable but typically at the cost of having a more limited feature set.