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There's a rare but persistent issue with Socket AM5 processors where, occasionally, they burn out. The name that has come up the most in discussions of this issue is ASRock, which might make you think that ASRock has had the most failures. That's not necessarily a given; the tracking of the problem started on the /r/ASRock sub-Reddit, and that's why many of the failure reports are on ASRock motherboards. Given its proximity to the problem, you might expect that ASRock would have already put out a statement about it. Well, it hadn't — until now, anyway.
In an official statement published on its website's "News" section, ASRock says it is "closely monitoring recent discussions regarding the performance and behavior of AMD Ryzen™ 9000 series processors on ASRock AMD platforms." No mention of exactly what the issues are, and no specific mention of Ryzen 9 or X3D processors, either — simply, 'we heard there's a problem, and we're looking into it.' Ten-four, ASRock. This echoes a similar statement from ASUS recently, and MSI has also released remarks on the issue.
In most reports, these chips normally get so hot that they leave scorch marks on the CPU and socket. Well, they don't normally fail at all, but you understand. We don't want to overstate the frequency of this issue; at the time of writing, there are around 350 reports, which sounds like a lot until you consider both that reports are not the same as verified, root-caused failures, and also the hundreds of thousands of Socket AM5 CPUs that are out there. This problem affects an infinitesimally tiny fraction of Socket AM5 users — but that doesn't make it any less frustrating, of course.
The "burnt CPUs" issue initially plagued the Ryzen 7000 series processors way back in 2023, and last year, it was frequently framed as an issue specifically affecting AMD's "X3D" gaming processors with 3D V-Cache. While the pictures of burned processors and melted CPU sockets are certainly evocative, it's not really clear that this problem is indicative of any kind of design flaw or reproducible fault in the processors or the motherboards. ASRock issued BIOS updates aimed to minimize the issue after community outrage, but some insist that the problem persists to this day.
Hardware YouTubers Gamers Nexus have put quite a few hours into trying to intentionally cause this kind of failure, and their efforts have largely been in vain, even when using a motherboard that was known to have already killed a processor once. Much like the situation with Intel's 13th/14th-generation CPUs, it's possible there is an element of "CPU vendor offers wide range of possible values; motherboard vendor picks the most extreme possible values" here. Who's actually at fault in that case is difficult to say, but AMD is replacing CPUs that die in this manner under its standard warranty, so it's hard to find fault there, anyway.
ASRock says it is "working in seamless coordination with AMD continuously to further validate system performance across a wide range of hardware configurations, while optimizing BIOS and enhancing overall system stability." While some users see the company silently shipping BIOS updates that modify voltage behavior and power profiles as an admission of guilt, it's just as likely that ASRock wants to minimize the amount of support requests it has to field and the number of processors AMD has to replace. Given the relatively low frequency of the faults, this one is probably better filed under "unfortunate manufacturing issues" and moved away from.
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