After a string of AMD CPUs and Asus motherboards were burning out in desktops, Asus has come forward with an explanation – along with repair experts.
AMD’s new Ryzen 7000 processors are currently being affected by a bug within the BIOS and motherboard hardware that’s causing them to burn up. In the ensuing aftermath, the processors’ PCB bulges outwards and the motherboard’s CPU socket has a dark, burn mark on the pins causing it to die as well.
What sparked further curiosity amongst those monitoring the situation over on Reddit, was that the official, older BIOS firmware for motherboards were pulled from Asus’ site.
Putting out that slight panic was Asus team member Rajinder Gill, who has now officially commented on the matter, stating in a message to tech YouTuber der8auer:
“The EFI updates posted on Friday contain some dedicated thermal monitoring mechanisms we’ve implemented to help protect the boards and CPUs.
“We removed older BlOSes for that reason and also because manual Vcore control was available on previous builds.
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“We’re also working with AMD on defining new rules for AMD Expo and SoC voltage. We’ll issue new updates for that ASAP.”
AMD CPUs are still burning in Asus boards
However, tech and repair YouTuber der8auer believe they’ve found more evidence of what’s causing AMD’s latest CPUs from burning up while seated in an Asus motherboard.
Putting the chip under a microscope shows that the voltage pins are the ones that appear to have died, while der8auer and the original reporter, Igor’s Lab, don’t believe it to be anything to do with contact between the CPU and motherboard.
Speculating a little bit based on the evidence given, der8auer believes that it’s potentially to do with temperature control on the devices. A lot of the faults appear to be in conjunction with the voltage control and the EXPO tech, which allows users to overclock their systems within AMD’s parameters.
nope once the voltage gets high enough it just breaks through the insulators inside the CPU. Also software voltage monitoring is really slow.
— Buildzoid (@Buildzoid1) April 24, 2023
This has been – again – backed up by other users monitoring the situation. Buildzoid1, a tech expert, says that despite slow monitoring from the software, the voltages being monitored in overclocked systems are enough to kill a system.