ASRock Might Have Admitted It's At Fault for Ryzen 9000 X3D Issues

After more than 100 reported instances of AMD Ryzen 9000 X3D CPUs breaking or having performance issues with ASRock motherboards, employees from the company have been quoted by a YouTuber as admitting some measure of fault on their end. This hasn’t been confirmed and is far from official. But it’s the first instance we’ve heard of anyone associated with ASRock admitting any kind of fault, even if it also placed the blame at AMD’s feet, too.
Although AMD’s Ryzen 9800X3D and 9950X3D are the undisputed kings of gaming performance, their post-launch lifecycle hasn’t been entirely smooth sailing. Shortages sent prices skyrocketing early on, and a few instances appeared of chips burning in the socket or just becoming unresponsive. These problems seemed to occur most often on ASRock motherboards, though the company initially claimed user error was at fault.
That was a dubious claim at the time, especially considering all the BIOS updates ASRock put out. But we now may have ASRock engineers admitting where the real error lies, and it’s not with the user.
“Well, when I sat down with the ASRock motherboard team, they told me it had to do with the EDC and TDC, which is the electric design current as well as the thermal design current,” Tech City Yes said in a recent YouTube video. “It’s an ampage problem that exists with the precision boost overdrive settings.”
The combination of PBO settings and ASRock’s own aggressive motherboard voltage settings can lead to instances of the chip’s breaking or burning out, they suggested. The motherboard engineers allegedly promised Tech City Yes that the issues had been fixed in the latest BIOS, with AMD giving them access to some “shadow voltages,” settings which BIOS developers aren’t normally allowed to tweak.
There has been no official statement from AMD or ASRock about this news, so take it all with a pinch of salt, but ASRock has been releasing a lot of BIOS updates for most of its 600-series motherboards this past week.
If you have an ASRock motherboard and an X3D CPU, be sure to update to the latest BIOS as and when you can, as it may help avoid your CPU becoming unusable. Do let us know if it affects performance, we’d love some first-hand perspectives; Though Tech City Yes did say that they hadn’t noticed any clock or performance differences in their testing, as per VideoCardz.
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