ASRock claims their PBO is to blame, even though they “found that the CPU is really defective”
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ASRock is not getting off lightly with its motherboard problems. As Gamers Nexus has now released its video on the chat it had with the VP of motherboards at ASRock on the insides of what is actually happening with the bout of failures seen across the community.
After TechYESCity talked about what it learned from ASRock, the answer seems to be very much the same. But Steve from Gamers Nexus does interview the VP on video for a lot more straight answers and insights into what has been happening. To summarize, it appears that ASRock’s decision to use aggressive PBO settings is to blame, which has been resolved with the new BIOS update, following the resolution of previously identified memory incompatibility issues.
ASRock interview highlights
After suggesting that there were a lot of memory incompatibility issues with the BIOS released a couple of months ago, which should have improved the defective issues, it was found that the processor was still working, and the problem was just with memory compatibility.
Even after that, others continued to appear that are unrelated to the RAM. That’s where Chris explains what else ASRock found.
We found that the CPU is really defective. There’s no burn mark on the outlook, but the CPU is just not working.
Chris Lee, VP of motherboards at ASRock
After saying that, Steve does question if that’s an AMD CPU issue, then. However, Chris was quick to dismiss the idea that it was the manufacturer’s fault, instead pointing back to the issue, which is down to their PBO (Precision Boost Overdrive) settings in the BIOS, with TDC and EDC to blame. They were set to a value that was too high. The processors that showed damage have been sent to AMD for analysis to determine the cause of the damage.
That doesn’t explain every problem with the burning processors, though, as not everyone was using PBO and essentially overclocking their CPUs. One of these suggestions is that there is an adaptive vSOC that’s too high and burning out the processor. Asked if ASRock has looked into this problem, Mike responds:
Yes, but we think the vSOC has nothing to do with this problem.
Wondering if there were any other issues that the BIOS settings might be causing the failures, he also responds
No we believe that in this BIOS we refined these PBO settings and we believe it can solve the issues.
With that, he recommends updating to BIOS 3.25 to ensure your CPU is safe and won’t be damaged by the older PBO settings. Steve also questioned the process. If you do find your motherboard and CPU affected, then Chris outlines what to
Until today we found that some CPU is really defective and also AMD covered these things, so through the normal RMA process send the CPU to AMD. For the motherboard until today we didn’t find any single one motherboard was fail, I meant defective. Motherboard is still working so motherboard is still good.
That suggests it might just require replacing the CPU, and the motherboard can be saved and does not need to be sent back to them. If you decide to do or know it’s not working anymore, ASRock is committed to covering the shipping in both directions.
Gamers Nexus video
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