Some owners of the latest AMD 7000X3D series processors have reported that their processors have burned out randomly. Reports across Reddit and on YouTube indicate that a number of 7950X3D and 7800X3D owners have experienced burn damage to both their CPU and AM5 socket, killing their processors and motherboards.
It’s a nightmare situation for any PC owner, especially since in many cases, these are new CPUs and motherboards that have only been on the market for a few weeks.
“I got my system back at full fan idle and a QCode of 00,” said Reddit user Speedrookie. Reset BIOS, and play[ed] with memory, then unpacked to find a bulging 7800X3D and took the socket with it.” Speedrookie posted a photo of the affected CPU with a visible bulge and burn mark on the motherboard’s CPU socket.
Speedrookie is not alone. Another Reddit user, dStruct714, Reply to the topic Pointing out that they also encountered a similar problem with the regular 7950X chip a few months ago. in Reddit thread chapterAnother user posted a picture of a new 7950X3D chip with what looks like a burn mark.
what’s going? We’ve reached out to both AMD and Asus for comment on the issues, as most of the reports have been with AMD motherboards. Neither company would comment at the time of publication, but an MSI representative shed some light on the issues.
“Recently, there have been reports of 7000X3D series CPUs getting damaged, which may be caused by abnormal voltage issues,” MSI says in a Reddit thread. It is important to note that the 7000X3D series CPUs do not support manual voltage and frequency adjustments, but only support PBO (Precision Boost Overdrive) overclocking. In order to prevent overvoltage and reduce the risk of damage to the 7000X3D series processors, MSI has added some restrictions in both BIOS AM5 Series and MSI Center.”
MSI has released new BIOS updates for its AM5 motherboards, which now only support negative offset of voltage settings to only reduce CPU voltage. It also appears that Asus has removed older BIOS versions for some AM5 motherboards and restricted CPU voltage options in the latest BIOS revisions.
Obviously something is going on with the CPU voltages on the latest AM5 motherboards, resulting in a situation that could damage both the CPU and the motherboard. If you own any of AMD’s latest Ryzen CPU or AM5 processors, I highly recommend that you update your BIOS immediately so that AMD can comment on exactly what’s going on here.
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