AMD’s new Ryzen 7000 X3D CPUs are burning out for some

Some owners of AMD’s latest 7000X3D series CPUs have reported that their processors have burnt out randomly. Reports across Reddit and on YouTube suggest that a number of 7950X3D and 7800X3D owners have experienced burn damage to both the CPU and the AM5 socket, killing the processors and motherboards.

It’s a nightmare situation for any PC owner, particularly since, in many cases, these are new CPUs and motherboards that have only been on the market for a matter of weeks.

“Came home to my system idling full fan and QCode of 00,” said Reddit user Speedrookie. “Reset BIOS, play[ed] with memory, then took it apart to find the 7800X3D bulged out and took the socket with it.” Speedrookie posted a photo of the affected CPU with a visible bulge and a burn mark on the motherboard CPU socket.

Speedrookie isn’t alone. Another Reddit user, dStruct714, replied to the thread noting they had also experienced a similar issue with a regular 7950X chip a few months ago. In a separate Reddit thread, another user posted an image of a new 7950X3D chip with what looks like a burn mark.

So what’s going on? We’ve reached out to both AMD and Asus to comment on the issues, as most of the reports have been with AMD motherboards. Neither company commented at the time of publication, but an MSI representative shed some light on the issues.

“Recently, there have been reports of the 7000X3D series CPUs being damaged, which may have been caused by abnormal voltage issues,” says MSI in a Reddit thread. “It’s important to note that the 7000X3D series CPUs do not support manual voltage and frequency adjustments, but only support PBO (Precision Boost Overdrive) overclocking. In order to prevent over-voltage and reduce the risk of damage to the 7000X3D series CPUs, MSI has added some restrictions in both the AM5 series BIOS and the MSI Center.”

MSI has issued new BIOS updates for its AM5 motherboards, which now only support a negative offset for voltage settings to reduce the CPU voltage only. Asus also appears to have removed older BIOS versions for some of its AM5 motherboards and has restricted CPU voltage options on the latest BIOS revisions.

So clearly something is going on with CPU voltages on the latest AM5 motherboards, leading to a situation that could damage both a CPU and a motherboard. If you own any of AMD’s latest Ryzen CPUs or AM5 motherboards, I’d highly recommend you update your BIOS immediately until AMD comments on exactly what’s happening here.