AMD’s X3D-series Ryzen chips have become popular with PC gamers because games in particular happen to benefit disproportionately from the chips’ extra 64MB of L3 cache memory. But that extra memory occasionally comes with extra headaches. Not long after they were released earlier this year, some early adopters started having problems with their CPUs, ranging from failure to boot to actual physical scorching and burnout—the problems were particularly common for users of the 9800X3D processor in ASRock motherboards, and one Reddit thread currently records 157 incidents of failure for that CPU model across various ASRock boards.
In an interview with the Korean language website Quasar Zone (via Tom’s Hardware), AMD executives David McAfee and Travis Kirsch acknowledged the problems and pointed to the most likely culprit: motherboard makers who don’t follow AMD’s recommended specifications. Some manufacturers have historically shipped their AMD and Intel motherboards with elevated default power settings in the interest of squeezing a bit more performance out of the chips—but those adjustments can also cause problems in some cases, especially for higher-end CPUs.
The AM5 socket has already been through a saga like this one before. Shortly after their release in early 2023, some Ryzen 7000-series X3D chips were becoming physically deformed, developing bulges on the bottom that could permanently damage the CPU and bend the pins in the CPU socket. AMD blamed some motherboards’ incorrect voltage settings for the problem and put out BIOS updates with more limitations on voltage to fix the problem.