Serious issue found in new AMD Ryzen CPUs – Reports of burnt chips and motherboards   

What happens;

After what happened when the RTX 4090 was first released, in recent days, the internet has been flooded with numerous reports of burnt Ryzen processors as well , with cases of extreme overheating causing damage to both the chips themselves and the motherboards they are installed on. The issue is so serious that motherboard manufacturers have already released BIOS updates with additional security mechanisms to limit incidents.

The problem can affect both the regular Ryzen 7000 models and the more special Ryzen 7000X3D processors , and issues have been reported across all motherboard brands , including Biostar, ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte and ASRock. The root cause is believed to be the voltage at which the SoC is running. It changes and reaches unsafe levels, either by ready-made EXPO overclocking profiles for memories, or by manual settings by users.

Excessively high voltages can destroy the thermal sensors and protection mechanisms of the chips, making them unable to detect and protect themselves from overheating. As a result, the processor continues to draw more power even when safe limits have already been exceeded, causing catastrophic damage.

AMD is said to be already working on a permanent fix that includes a new voltage cap or a lock in the firmware/SMU to prevent EXPO memory profiles and user BIOS manipulations from reaching that high of a voltage. For their part, several motherboard manufacturers, such as ASUS and MSI, have already released new BIOS to help address the issue.

Of course, we are still waiting for some official statement from AMD that clarifies what exactly is happening in reality. Until then, all Ryzen 7000 processor users are advised to take precautionary measures by checking the SoC voltage in the BIOS or using a utility from within Windows such as HWiNFO. If the voltage is at 1.4V or exceeds 1.4V, they should immediately disable the overclocking profile of their RAMs and continue using the memories with the default settings.