In the past several months, reports of AMD Ryzen 9000 series CPUs failing has been emerging in rather rapid succession, prompting concerns of another Intel 13/14th Gen-esque flaw that may contribute to mass failures; however, it was later narrowed down a specific group of users: those who use ASRock motherboards.
ASRock Addresses Failed Ryzen CPUs
While the motherboard maker initially dismissed concerns of its motherboards contributing to CPU failures and instead pointed at memory compatibility issues, Australian-based creator Tech YES City (who happened to have one Ryzen 9 9950X3D processor failed under ASRock motherboard) decided to inquire the company in Computex show floor. While no official statement was published at this time, there are some answers.
The root cause of this issue is related to PBO (Precision Boost Overdrive), an overclocking feature built into modern Ryzen processors that allows the CPU to run effectively without power limits in place (and as much as cooling would allow). Specifically, it’s the EDC (Electric Design Current) and TDC (Thermal Design Current) values – ASRock admitted that its PBO settings were “too aggressive for what the CPUs were able to handle, at least [in] the earlier samples,” according to the creator.
ASRock further notes that latest BIOS updates should fix these issues which happens on mid-range and high-end motherboards – low-end models are unlikely to be affected as the company never designed the these models with aggressive overclocking in mind. Besides that, they also tuned something called “shadow voltages”, a set of parameters that was presumably hidden outside of AMD’s engineers that was only recently given to ASRock’s engineers to fine-tune these values.
As there is no official statement published at this time, the company hasn’t made a decision on initiating RMA process for affected units; it is possible that some systems with problematic BIOS versions may prematurely degrade the Ryzen processors onboard in ways similar to Intel’s Raptor Lake chips (of which microcode bugs were to blame for the degradation and related failures).
Pokdepinion: Let’s hope that’s the end of it.
