Possible Reasons for Crashing on Intel i7/i9 + Z790 Motherboard Set-Ups

+
Hopefully this will be a helpful FYI for people getting consistent CTD's on Cyberpunk (Vanilla or Modded). This is mostly applicable to those with recent Intel i7/i9 chips and the Z790 motherboard (though I believe others may also be affected).

My 200+ hour playthrough of the game (set-up is: Windows 11, i9 14900k, 4090 RTX, Z790-I, 2x 32GB DDR5 RAM, SSD) was plagued with many CTD's with the EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION (0XC0000005) error code.

I'm running CP2077 on max-out settings and heavily modded via Vortex—mostly with resource-intensive mods (increased LODs, 4k ENV Textures, ReShade, 3x Traffic + Pedestrians, etc.) so that's adding instability on top of a game notoriously known to already lean on the unstable side.

On a stable system, the worst that should happen is stuttering, lagging and a drop in FPS (effects of bottlenecking) NOT an immediate CTD. After many hours of troubleshooting and looking at all possible causes, I've found the likely culprit is my particular Motherboard + CPU set-up (i9 14900k + Z790). The default BIOS settings is fedding far too much power to the CPU, compromising the chip and causing extreme instability (hence the crashing).

Recently, Intel has recognized that their chipset is unstable with current top-shelf motherboards and will be making a public statement about this next month. They are also blaming the motherboard manufacturers, though I suspect they are both to blame.

Here are multiple articles on this issue:

If you've been suffering similar crashes, the ideal solution imo is to get your i7/i9 CPU RMA'd and once you install your replacement CPU, get the latest BIOS update that will run your CPU at factory settings... If you don't want to RMA and want to keep your current CPU, use this guide to adjust your voltage and energy settings in your BIOS to add some stability to your rig( https://www.reddit.com/r/overclocking/comments/1axepvu ).

Without doing any of the above, your CPU is at risk of major degradation and instability and when combined with a resource-heavy game like Cyberpunk, frequent CTDs are to be expected. Obviously, there can be other reasons as well (incompatable mods, etc.) but if you are running a recent Intel i7/i9 set-up there's a good chance this is a major contributor to your CP2077 crashes.

Sharing this so you don't have to look through 92183423738 posts on multiple forums trying to figure out what's wrong with your game like I did.
 
Last edited:
Top Bottom