Disabling a specific component in an Intel Core i9-9900K SRELS processor
Disabling a specific component in an Intel Core i9-9900K SRELS processor
Hey there, enthusiasts. I stumbled upon an older Core i9-9900K that appears to have a single failed core. Specifically, the sixth core seems to trigger crashes. I purchased this CPU from someone who shared a board with an ASUS Z370 that had a damaged CPU socket—some pins got bent and fell out when trying to level it. On this faulty board, the CPU only displays three cores, and it sometimes boots up. The guy even sent me some screenshots from Windows showing three cores, no hardware detected. Since I haven’t owned many broken i9s, I figured it might be possible to boot a working CPU on a compromised socket. But there’s a chance the motherboard could detect enough of it to start the process. After all, I saw similar setups with three cores showing up on a broken board. Now, when I installed the CPU into my trusted Gigabyte Aorus Z370 Ultra Gaming (latest F16b BIOS) with two 8GB DDR4 modules at 3200 and nothing else, it booted without issues. Then I added a single M.2 SSD and a bootable Win11 USB—success! But when I crashed into BSOD with HAL_INITIALIZATION_FAILED, I used MemTEST86 to check. It revealed errors and eventually failed after too many. So I swapped in a new dual-channel RAM setup with Patriot Viper Steel and fresh 2x16GB modules. The results matched the pictures. I continued testing, but only enabling one core in MemTEST86 worked. Then I adjusted the BIOS settings—disabling hyper threads and limiting to five active cores. The tests still failed, consistently pointing back to core six. Before discarding it, I wondered if there’s a way to modify the BIOS and disable that sixth core directly. Any suggestions? Thanks, George.
It seems this feature for toggling specific cores wasn't added until the 10th generation. It's unlikely to be available in the 9th gen. You might want to adjust the settings and see if it improves performance, as 9900Ks could allow per-core adjustments.