It’s been quite a few months now that many Reddit users have been reporting their Ryzen 9000 CPUs burning up, which seemingly mostly occurred on ASRock motherboards. That also affected a YouTuber, Tech YES City, just before Computex, so he took the opportunity to chat with the company to find out more details on what has been happening.

It took ASRock some time to finally acknowledge the problems back in March, and it even attempted BIOS updates already to try and resolve this problem, but now it might have finally found and resolved the problems. Talking with Bryan, whose 9950X3D had failed on an ASRock motherboard, they suggested it was a problem with the PBO and overclocking of the CPU.

Since some of their motherboards are able to run PBO out of the box, they might have been too aggressive on the settings and beyond what those processors were capable of handling. In particular, the EDC and TDC are going beyond the spec. Even though AMD dictates the safe ranges for this PBO, ASRock might have flown too close to the sun with its dialing in and putting too much current into the CPU and burning it out.

ASRock suggests it may also affect some users more than others. In particular, those using an AIO cooler on their CPU, as that allows the CPU to be overclocked even further and reach those higher, more dangerous settings, thanks to its cooling ability.

There was also mention of Shadow voltages that ASRock couldn’t access, and AMD might have been able to help them out now to make sure they stay within regulation. Neither has released a statement on the problem, but updating to the latest BIOS and putting the CPU back in safe settings is the way to go.

Is the Ryzen CPU burning finally resolved?

ASRock claimed to Bryan that this issue should now be resolved. It has released another BIOS update for its range of motherboards, such as the X870E Steel Legend one shown below. Optimizing the PBO settings and updating the AGESA code for the processor looks to fix this issue.

In the video, Tech YES City also tested this performance before and after the update, and it looks to have some effect. Cinebench scores stayed the same, even with a slight power draw increase. While in gaming, the FPS did drop by a couple of percent, even with the same clock speeds being achieved.

But that might not be the worst penalty to pay; a slight hit to performance is much preferred to your processor actually burning up. Stability and safety are probably the best endings here.

Full video

About the Author

Sebastian Kozlowski

With a fascination for technology and games, Seb is a tech writer with a focus on hardware and deals. He is also the primary tester and reviewer at BGFG and PCGuide.