Over the several months, you may have seen reports of AMD’s Ryzen 9 9800X3D CPUs committing electrical seppuku on ASRock motherboards. Turns out, it’s not just a handful of them that are biting the dust, it’s more than a hundred.
A subreddit shows that 98 9800X3D users reported their CPUs dying with the use of ASRock motherboards. To be absolutely clear, as well as fair, the issue of popping 9800X3D processors isn’t just limited to ASRock boards; it just so happens that the majority of CPU deaths have occurred with them. As graciously pointed out by the Reddit community, 16 of the CPUs died on ASUS motherboards, five on MSI boards, and one death was reported on a Gigabyte board.
ASRock initially pushed back on the claims that its motherboards were faulty, stating that a good cleaning of the big component was all that’s needed to “fix” the issue. Shortly after both the company and AMD released a statement on the matter, indicating that they had isolated the issue down to a memory incompatibility issue.
ASRock has released a fix through a new BIOS update since then. That said, it should be noted that some 9800X3D weren’t chip failures but mere boot issues. On that note, many of the CPU failures have been resolved with the affected users simply RMA’ing them.
(Source: Reddit [1] [2], PC Gamer, Tom’s Hardware)
