AMD probes reports of deep fried Ryzen 7000 chips

Excessive processor voltages have been identified as the potential culprit of fried Ryzen 7000 and X3D CPUs and damaged motherboards. In a statement provided to The Register, AMD acknowledged the issue, stating it is aware of a "limited number of reports online claiming that excess voltage while overclocking may have damaged …

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Stupid "Optimized defaults" nonsense.

Quite a few manufacturers offer "optimized defaults", which don't hint clearly that these are the high overclocking defaults. Which result in weird instabilities far too often. ASUS started that nonsense, and some other, like MSI, jumped on that bandwagon.

A purely mainboard manufacturer f-up. AMD just plays along nicely for PR reasons, they wouldn't have to since it is not AMDs fault for ASUS/MSI etc frying up the CPUs with bad settings.

[Nate Amsden]

Re: Stupid "Optimized defaults" nonsense.

Count me in on the clueless I guess.

I bought a Ryzen 3700X on the day it was released along with an Gigabyte "X570 I AORUS PRO WIFI", which I think was the only Mini ITX board available at the time. Bought good Micron memory and enabled the XMP feature to run the memory at the right speed(which to me wasn't overclocking as that was specifically what the memory was sold to operate at). Looking at the manual again there is no indication XMP had any effect on the CPU, I always assumed it was a memory specific function. I'm not one to overclock, the only time I ever intentionally overclocked was a P200MMX to 233Mhz(or was it 225Mhz..).

I did fry that board after less than a year(December 2019), first time in 20+ years I had a motherboard fail on a personal system that I can recall anyway. After the system froze overnight(during encoding), I power cycled it, but it would not turn on again. I tried many times and eventually the magic smoke came out of a component on the lower right side of the board with tiny sparks. Gigabyte accepted the RMA without question(or explanation) and replaced the board(with same revision number, was hoping it would be a newer revision that fixed some known issue), been working fine since - no other components were damaged. The only thing that system does is encode video with handbrake(otherwise stays powered off). Though my backlog has been clear for some time it's probably encoded a few thousand hours worth of stuff.

Had a good quality power supply (PC Power & Cooling, reused from earlier Athlon build and still in use today, total of over 12 years of service and counting), and it was connected to a double conversion UPS, so power quality was as good as it could get.

[Jim Mitchell]

Re: Stupid "Optimized defaults" nonsense.

I think that these days the memory is directly attached to the processor chip, which is really more than just the processor. If you change the memory clocks or voltage, you are affecting the processor.

[rcxb]

Re: Stupid "Optimized defaults" nonsense.

Since the beginning of time, changing the memory clock/speed has affected the processor.

CPU speeds (MHz) have always been determined by bus speed x multiplier. Set by dip switches or jumpers on the motherboards, before becoming a menu option in your BIOS/CMOS/UEFI.

[Ropewash]

Re: Stupid "Optimized defaults" nonsense.

For a short period during (iirc)the Intel BX days some board makers de-coupled the RAM from FSB through a multiplier.

So you could run 133 memory while keeping your FSB at 100 and your AGP therefore at 66.

[Nate Amsden]

Re: Stupid "Optimized defaults" nonsense.

Certainly have been aware that cpus have integrated memory controllers for years. And cpu and bus speed(been building my own computers since 486 days). The misleading stuff is the XMP made it seem like I needed this memory to run at the best speed that the cpu supported out of the box. No overclocking was implied(in manual or in bios settings). It seemed like just a setting to tell the cpu "hey this memory is fast enough".

[Spazturtle]

Re: Stupid "Optimized defaults" nonsense.

"Bought good Micron memory and enabled the XMP feature to run the memory at the right speed(which to me wasn't overclocking as that was specifically what the memory was sold to operate at)."

I have always hated XMP.

If you look at the back of a pack of RAM it will say the RAM's actual JEDEC speed and state that the RAM might not be able to reach the XMP speed and that they won't accept warranty claims for the RAM failing to reach XMP speeds.

[Missing Semicolon]

Re: Stupid "Optimized defaults" nonsense.

Nice board.... but... RGB! Aaagh!

[Kevin McMurtrie]

My Asus motherboard had tons of problems with the AMD 7950X (not X3D). The board comes with 4 DDR5 slots but only using 2 was tested. Only many BIOS updates and manually setting some clocks gets it booting reliably. I am never moving the jumper to enable raising the CPU voltage.