There have been plenty of damaged Ryzen 7 9800X3D cases in the last two months and most cases show CPU failure while motherboards work flawlessly.
Out of 107 Incidents, The Majority of 9800X3D Failure Reports Come from ASRock Motherboard Owners, but Apparently, Motherboards aren't Damaged in Most Cases
It appears that history is repeating itself. Last time it was Intel's Core i7 and i9 chips from the 13th and 14th generations and this time, it's AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU. There is a lot to investigate, but in the last two months, numerous reports have emerged, particularly on Reddit, where we saw physically damaged CPUs and in some cases the death was silent.
A user compiled almost all such cases (mostly from Reddit), and it came out to be roughly 107 in total in the last two months. Out of 107 cases, the majority of reports are from ASRock motherboard owners, but there have been some ASUS, MSI, and Gigabyte incidents as well. Most incidents happened on ASRock 800 series motherboards, including X870 and B850. However, some CPUs also failed on 600 series motherboards.
After going through a few of them, we saw that most CPU failures occurred in just a few weeks and in some cases, the CPU died in half an hour. What is exactly happening here is quite complex, because in some cases we see burnt CPUs, which could indicate either overvoltage or user error, but in other cases, the CPUs showed no signs of physical damage and the respective motherboards were working totally fine with alternatives such as another X3D CPU or a non-X3D CPU.
In some incidents, the Ryzen 9800X3D failed twice and hence, users had to go through the long RMA process twice. One could imagine if there is some kind of common factor here, but it's not easy to figure that out. While there were users who reported Ryzen 9800X3D's death after turning on EXPO or manual CPU overclocking, there were cases where users didn't touch anything in the BIOS and still met with the same fate.
These reports definitely instill fear into Ryzen 9800X3D owners, particularly those who own ASRock 800 series motherboards, but it should also be kept in mind that Ryzen 7 9800X3D sells thousands of units from most retailers every day. Therefore, the reports are only a fraction of the 9800X3D units sold, but the incidents are expected to grow as we move on. Ryzen 9 9950X3D has also appeared on the list even though there have only been a couple of such cases till now.
Nonetheless, this doesn't mean that the problem doesn't exist or isn't crucial. Both AMD and ASRock need to dive deeper into the issue while we also await independent investigations from other outlets.
News Source: Reddit
