We’ve heard multiple reports of Intel’s 13th Gen CPUs failing to boot on older Z690 motherboards. Till now, all the incidents involved ASUS Z690 boards wherein the Core i9-13900K was up to 48% slower than usual. Furthermore, some users have been facing problems getting the Z690 to POST with Raptor Lake processors. To make matters worse, these issues can be reproduced using the latest firmware as well.
In one case, the ASUS TUF Z690 failed to detect the attached M.2 drives and memory properly. The motherboard didn’t recognize the drive on the first M.2 slot, while the memory (rated for 3600MT/s) refused to run at the expected speeds. According to the client, he tried using a brand-new memory kit from Corsair, officially compatible with the board.
The BIOS had a bunch of issues. None of the SSDs showed up in the NVMe section. Out of the 64GB memory installed, only 32GB is recognized by the BIOS and OS. Swapping the DIMMs didn’t help either. We faced similar issues with a Gigabyte Z690 Aero DDR4 upon pairing it with the Core i9-13900K.
For starters, the system doesn’t boot up using the iGPU, while getting to the BIOS is a massive headache. Dual-DIMM configurations result in a boot loop, and the memory can’t be overclocked to stable figures above 3,600 MT/s (for kits rated at 4,600MT/s). Installing an operating system is another landmine. The setup does start with a single DIMM, but after the first restart, you get stuck in another boot loop wherein there’s no error code on the LEDs.
Nothing seems to work. We’ve tried with different 13th Gen Core CPUs, memory kits, and M.2 drives across both CPU and SB slots. We’ve applied for RMA and will update the story if the same problem can be reproduced on the replacement.
