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Crumbs in the socket, nothing to see here. So, said ASRock last week in a blog post addressing reports of dead AMD Ryzen 9000 chips in its motherboards. But does that really fly in the context of getting on for 100 Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPUs said to have died in ASRock boards?
To be more specific, at one recent count on Reddit, 98 9800X3Ds are reported to have expired in ASRock motherboards. But before we all jump on ASRock’s neck, it is not the only motherboard vendor mentioned by Redditors suffering CPU failures.
By the same count, 16 9800X3Ds have gone pop in Asus boards, five in MSI sockets and a single solitary CPU in a Gigabyte item.
All of these failures are allegedly of 9800X3Ds that have booted in the board and been functional for at least a period of time. According to another Reddit post tracking the failures, “So far there are 108 stories from people of 9800X3D which passed POST, and was working for a short amount of time before suddenly dying with no signs of failure.”
If you were wondering if the failures are related to a specific chipset, it seems not. Roughly 45% of reports involve the X870 chipset, about one-third for the B850, with the B650 and X670 also allegedly notching up multiple kills.
Some of these reports date back as far as November. So this problem, whatever it is, has been ongoing for some time. ASRock issued a BIOS update in February to address boot issues with AMD Ryzen 9000-series and then another with the same remit last week. At no point has ASRock even implied that its motherboards might be to blame for dead CPUs and the company has been clear that the BIOS updates address failure to boot not actual overall CPU failure.
Exactly what to make of it all is hard to say. The 9800X3D is an expensive CPU, but it’s also been something of a smash hit. As we reported in November, it sold out fast shortly after launch, leading to scalpers listing the chip for as much as $999. Lest you have forgotten, this is a chip that’s meant to list for $479.
So, there are almost certainly a lot of them out there, as in thousands upon thousands. Of course, not every single failure will have been reported on Reddit.
As for our experience, we have three 9800X3Ds in-house at PC Gamer. Our test rig based on a Gigabyte Aorus Master mobo has been running a 9800X3D and has been used for all of our GPU reviews since the Intel B850 card in December with no problems.
Our other two 9800X3Ds are in MSI motherboards and have likewise not been problematic. For now, then, it’s hard to say exactly how extensive the problem is or what’s causing it. But there are enough reports now to say that there’s probably something a little more extensive going on than the usual and inevitable failures you’ll see with pretty much any product.
Likewise, it seems unlikely that it’s all caused by a spate of crumbs-in-socket scenarios as implied by ASRock. As for the split that heavily tilts towards ASRock, that could indicate a particular problem with those boards. But it could also reflect the elevated popularity of ASRock platforms. Again, the data is equivocal for now.
We’ll keep a weather eye on developments and report back if anything more substantial emerges.
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Kurt Indovina
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