ASRock claims to fix 'burned out' AM5 motherboard by cleaning the socket

ASRock has issued a second update addressing boot-up and CPU damage issues on its AM5 motherboards. This time in a blog post, the board maker went the extra mile to prove its BIOS updates are not causing motherboard and CPU damage by fixing a customer's AM5 motherboard that showed signs of CPU socket burn damage.

ASRock achieved this by restoring the motherboard above without actually "fixing" it. ASRock cleaned and removed debris from the motherboard's CPU socket and fired up the board with its original BIOS. Despite not actually repairing the socket, the board booted successfully and "passed long-term stress testing" according to ASRock.

Efforts to repair this specific board appear to be in direct response to a previous report of one Ryzen 7 9800X3D burning out on an ASRock motherboard. In fact, the "socket damage" on the board ASRock fixed looks identical to the damaged motherboard in the aforementioned report.

If so, the board maker's findings suggest that the aforementioned 9800X3D burnout was in fact a case of user error of some kind — meaning, the debris shouldn't have been in the socket pins. What's not clear is whether the debris in this case came during the PC build process, or if it came via ASRock.

It's also unclear if the original CPU shown on Reddit still works, or if it's dead even while a 'cleaned' board lives another day with a different CPU. Modern CPU sockets typically have a lot of pins dedicated to power and ground, so missing a few of these might not result in a dead platform. The Reddit image certainly looks bad, particularly on the CPU itself, but perhaps the affected pins were not vital for proper operation.

In the same update, ASRock also announced the full non-beta release of BIOS version 3.20 to its AM5 motherboards, featuring memory compatibility improvements. This update addresses widespread reports of boot-up issues occurring on many ASRock AM5 motherboards.

Alarms about CPU burnout and boot-up issues started to ring when the aforementioned 9800X3D burnout case was reported. Afterward, ASRock moderators on Reddit created a megathread highlighting over 40 Reddit posts complaining about allegedly "dead" Ryzen 9000 series CPUs (mostly 9800X3D chips), the vast majority of which were coming from ASRock customers. The primary issue was an inability to POST (or boot up) with Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPUs.

ASRock first responded to these issues in February, revealing the issues were related to memory incompatibility issues affecting all Ryzen 9000 series parts, preventing customers' motherboards from booting up. At the time, the board maker also released beta BIOS 3.20 to rectify this problem.

Now, it appears ASRock has finally brought those changes into an official format for everyone to download in the form of BIOS 3.20. Hopefully, this will mark the end of any issues related to ASRock AM5 motherboards and Ryzen 9000 series CPUs.

Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.