Some owners of AMD’s latest 7000X3D series CPUs have reported that their processors have burned out randomly. Reports on Reddit and on YouTube suggest that a number of 7950X3D and 7800X3D owners have suffered fire damage to both the CPU and AM5 socket, destroying the processors and motherboards.
A horror situation for every PC owner, especially since in many cases these are new CPUs and mainboards that have only been on the market for a few weeks.
“My system came home with the fan full and the QCode of 00 idling,” said Reddit user Speedrookie. “Reset BIOS, play[ed] with memory, then took it apart to find the 7800X3D was dented and took the socket with it.” Speedrookie posted a photo of the affected CPU with a visible bulge and a burn mark on the motherboard CPU socket.
Speedrookie is not alone. Another Reddit user, dStruct714, replied to the thread and noted that he had also experienced a similar issue with a regular 7950X chip a few months ago. In a separate Reddit thread, another user posted a picture of a new 7950X3D chip that looks like a burn mark.
So what’s going on? We’ve reached out to both AMD and Asus to comment on the issues, as most of the reports concern AMD motherboards. At the time of publication, neither company commented, but an MSI representative shed light on the issues.
“Recently, there have been reports of damage to 7000X3D series CPUs that may have been caused by abnormal voltage issues,” MSI says in a Reddit thread. “It is important to note that the 7000X3D series CPUs do not support manual voltage and frequency adjustment, only PBO (Precision Boost Overdrive) overclocking. To prevent over-voltage and reduce the risk of damaging 7000X3D series CPUs, MSI added some restrictions in both AM5 series BIOS and MSI Center.”
MSI has released new BIOS updates for its AM5 motherboards, which now only support a negative offset for voltage settings to only reduce CPU voltage. Asus also appears to have removed older BIOS versions for some of its AM5 motherboards and has restricted CPU voltage options for the latest BIOS revisions.
So there is clearly something going on with the CPU voltages on the latest AM5 motherboards, creating a situation that could damage both a CPU and a motherboard. If you own one of AMD’s latest Ryzen CPUs or AM5 motherboards, I highly recommend updating your BIOS immediately until AMD comments on exactly what’s happening here.
