Some Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPUs are dying unexpectedly, mostly on Asrock motherboards – is user error to blame?

In brief: AMD's Ryzen 7 9800X3D remains an incredibly popular CPU, especially among gamers. But it seems not every buyer is having a good experience. There have been over 100 cases of owners whose chips have died after working for a short amount of time, and for no obvious reason.

Reddit user natty_overlord compiled a list of all 108 Reddit posts involving a Ryzen 7 9800X3D that died. The chips passed POST and worked for varying amounts of time before dying with no signs of failure.

What's interesting is the brand of motherboard these failures occurred on. 98 of the cases, or 82%, happened on Asrock boards, though that could be due to their popularity as a more budget-friendly board maker. Tom's Hardware notes that the company released a new firmware update for AM5 motherboards in February that improved boot problems in AMD 9000 series CPUs. Whether those issues are related to the dying chips is unclear.

Also read: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D Review: The New Gaming CPU King

The rest of the boards are made up of 16 from Asus, 5 from MSI, and 1 from Gigabyte.

natty_overlord also tallied the cases based on chipset. The largest number of incidents, 49, occurred on X870, followed by B850 (36), B650 (16), and X670 (7). Being a relatively new chip, it's not too surprising that most of the cases happened on the latest 800-series boards.

The time it took for the CPUs to experience failure ranged from just half and hour to a few months.

Several cases of Ryzen 7 9800X3D chips mysteriously dying surfaced earlier this year. One Redditor said he built a brand-new PC with an Asrock X870 motherboard that ran smoothly without overclocking or high temperatures. But the system shut down after about three weeks while he was watching TV. Upon inspection, the 9800X3D chip and motherboard showed severe thermal damage (below).

The situation brings to mind the overheating problems in the Ryzen 7000X3D CPUs from a couple of years ago that were related to AMD EXPO profiles and SoC voltages. It led to Asus updating its warranty policy for AM5 motherboards following an investigation by Gamers Nexus.

It's worth remembering that while over 100 incidents is no small number, there are thousands of Ryzen 7 9800X3D sold every month. It was initially difficult to buy the chips as they were sold out everywhere, something AMD blamed on Intel's "horrible" CPU release (Arrow Lake desktop). Moreover, some of these failures will likely have been due to user error, as was the case with one of the first reported instances of 9800X3Ds burning up in November.