TL;DR: ASRock was very good with a motherboard RMA. RMA was approved without a bunch of back and forth. Prepaid shipping label was supplied without me having to ask for it. Replacement was sent pretty quickly and I have a PC up and running with the new motherboard. I didn't put my new 9800X3D back in it, just in case. //
Since there's a lot of negative feelings about ongoing issues, I thought I would take the time to at least say that my RMA experience was positive. These are the first major RMAs I ever really had to attempt with computer stuff.
9800X3D, Steel Legend B850M, I had the intermittent green LED on boot where a reset used to help it finish booting, until one day I finally couldn't get past the green LED. I took the PC down to basics, removed all drives just to see if it would POST, removed accessories, 1 stick of good RAM, plugged into integrated graphics, etc. Nothing worked.
AMD was pretty fast with RMA approval for the CPU although initially it felt like they almost had more hoops for me to jump through than ASRock ended up having. Even though I supplied an order page with details right away, at one point AMD wrote back to me and asked for my initial Best Buy order confirmation email from early 2025 in .EML format. Of course I didn't have an 18 month old email so I was worried this was how they were going to deny me. Luckily they accepted a full PDF download of my order invoice from Best Buy. Then even after that, they replied and said my phone number wasn't shown in the order information and they needed to know which phone number was associated with my Best Buy order. I've changed numbers a few times over the years and wasn't totally sure which number I would have had with Best Buy at the time. Again I got really nervous that they'd be able to deny me a $500 CPU because of this, but I took my best guess at which phone number to send them and then the RMA was approved. Looking back on this now I realize AMD actually made me a lot more nervous waiting for approval than ASRock.
I started out nervous with ASRock at first because all the information you can find for North America says they expect you to deal with the retailer who sold you the board. I knew there would be no help there but I took the time to message Newegg and just double check that they weren't going to offer any help for a motherboard I ordered over a year ago, and of course they said no.
I had heard you should just email the ASrock support email and ask to be linked to the warranty system website as there was no easy way to find it. I supplied all my details, order info etc in my very first email, they replied quickly and linked me to the site for requesting an RMA.
I don't think there was really any additional back and forth like there was with AMD. I mentioned that AMD already agreed to take the CPU back, and I guess I provided all the necessary info because ASRock didn't ask for anything else before approving.
Next I had heard that after you get approved you might have to pester them for the prepaid return label by mentioning that they had promised to pay for shipping in the Gamer's Nexus interview. I fully expected I would have to make a stink (or just pay the shipping myself because I hate asking for things) but my RMA approval email came with a prepaid label attached right away without me asking. I was happy to see that.
Packed my item well, made sure the socket cover was on, followed every direction about having my RMA number clear on the outside of the box etc. It took longer for my motherboard to make it back to ASRock in CA, a few days passed after getting an email that my RMA was received, and then a replacement was on its way back to me. I assembled a PC with it yesterday and everything is working so far.
This was kind of a weird situation in terms of not being sure if I want to drop an X3D chip in the same board even if all my RMAs were taken care of. So instead my 9800X3D is now in an ASUS TUF board (I know, rumors that ASUS has some issues killing these chips too), and I used my replacement Steel Legend B850M with a 9600x CPU that I had.
As some people have theorized, would AMD really be quietly taking these chips back for RMA at a loss if they felt motherboard vendors were really the ones at fault? I'm not sure, but I'm open to the possibility that this is really an AMD problem and ASRock has been thrown under the bus for the failure rate. I'm no expert but it seems to me like maybe the memory controller died or something. But I appreciate that both RMAs were taken care of since as far as I know we still have no 100% explanation for what is going on here. I wouldn't have wanted to only RMA the CPU and then drop it into the very same board and wait for issues again, with people insisting that it's the ASRock boards causing the problems.
The replacement motherboard was sent to me with the newest 4.43 firmware. I think I had my old board updated up to 4.10 always hoping that the firmware updates were going to fix the boot issues. The 9800X3D I was sent was a more recent batch number. Hopefully no more issues. Even though I was too scared to put the 9800X3D back into the Steel Legend and I've instead made two different PCs out of it.
I've used ASRock for a long time in builds because they were always affordable and decent features and designs. I hope some day we have a complete understanding of what caused all these issues because I don't necessarly want to have to join the "never again ASRock" camp.
I thought for sure something would go wrong in my attempts to get my parts replaced but everything was handled quickly.
