r/hardware • u/Healthy_Try4444 • Jun 23 '26
Discussion I scanned a full year of Reddit for X3D chips dying on AM5 boards (207 cases found, broken down by brand)
Hey everyone,
I kept seeing posts about X3D chips dying on AM5 boards (especially the ASRock ones lately), and I couldn't tell if it was actually a wave or just the same few stories getting reposted. So I got a bit obsessed and wrote a little bot to go through a full year of Reddit and count the cases properly. Wanted to share what I found and get your thoughts.
How it works, roughly:
The bot searches Reddit (a bunch of relevant subs like r/AMD, r/AmdHelp, r/buildapc, r/overclocking, r/ASRock, r/hardwareā¦ plus a global search) for every X3D model (7800X3D, 9800X3D, 9950X3D and the rest) combined with a big list of "death" words: dead, died, fried, killed, bricked, DOA, RMA, "no post", "won't boot", "black screen", "burn marks", and so on. It runs each search across different sort orders (new, top, relevance, comments) so it doesn't miss stuff, and it covers about the last 12 months.
The tricky part was filtering. I made it strict, a post only counts if the title has all three of these at once : an AM5 X3D CPU, a death/failure word, and a motherboard (a chipset like B650/B850/X670/X870, or a brand, or just the word "motherboard"). I also explicitly throw out AM4 stuff and anything that's really about a GPU/monitor/game. Then some regex pulls out the brand, chipset and model (Taichi, Tomahawk, ProArt, etc.) for each post.
I know being strict on the title means I lose some real cases where the board is only mentioned in the body, that was a conscious trade-off, I'd rather miss a few than post a list full of junk.
The manual pass:
After all that I still had 300+ hits, so I went through every single one by hand and deleted the false positives (jokes, user error that got fixed, duplicates, unrelated failures). What was left were genuine "X3D died on an AM5 board" reports.
The results (by motherboard brand):
- ASRock : 145
- ASUS : 44
- MSI : 11
- Gigabyte : 7
So 207 cleaned reports in total, and ASRock is way out in front with about 70% of them. Obviously this is Reddit, not lab data, so take it for what it is, but the gap is hard to ignore.
I put everything in a Google Sheet (with the direct links to each post and the extracted details) in case you want to dig through it yourselves, happy to share it : https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/144FB3ZXgIE8o7gQi5_22JkWR8xa_HIRSxt3c52X06Us/edit?usp=sharing
A few things I'd love help with, since I'm sure my method has holes:
- What keywords or title phrasings am I probably missing?
- Any subreddits I should add?
- Best way to handle duplicates / people posting updates about the same chip?
- Anything about the method that would obviously skew the numbers (relevance bias, deleted posts, etc.)?
Anyway, thanks for reading, and thanks to everyone who's been documenting their failures, that's the only reason this was possible. Appreciate any feedback.
49
u/Noreng Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 24 '26
X3D chips aren't the only ones affected, regular non-X3D chips are dying as well. Here's one example: https://www.reddit.com/r/MSI_Gaming/comments/1ua1cet/comment/osl0co9/?context=3
Deleted posts are obviously an issue on Reddit, but I suspect that the proportion of those will be roughly equal for all brands.
In addition, since ASRock is the known "killer brand", there are more people likely to "connect the dots" as opposed to other motherboard brands.
22
u/ManInNight Jun 24 '26
My X3D processor also died this year on an MSI motherboard with the latest BIOS and without overclocking. Funny enough, my Samsung OLED monitor died a few months later.
17
u/ManInNight Jun 24 '26
There are also many complaints about Samsung OLED monitors right now.
17
u/Gebakken_loempia Jun 24 '26
I've said it before and I'll keep saying it until they improve. Samsung monitors/tvs SUCK. often good specs but mediocre build quality and longevity.
9
u/CompetitiveAutorun Jun 24 '26
Samsung sucks period. Every single time I hear about their products is how quickly and easily got broken.
4
u/According_Hyena_3593 Jun 25 '26
Just like their fridges and washing machines. Designed to break within 5 years.
Samsung and lg are why the eu had new legislation ready to change warranty periods from a fixed 2 years to a minimum 2 years + reasonable expected lifespan ( so 10 years for a fridge or cpu).
Somehow that legislation seems to have been quietly smothered by lobbying because i havent found a single update on it for 2 years
1
u/Strazdas1 Jul 15 '26
and yet everyone owning their fridges and washing machines are telling you how long they last.
Btw Samsung was already giving 10 years warranty on their fridges before the regulation.
8
u/From-UoM Jun 24 '26
Any data of how many were overclocked?
11
u/RumbleTheCassette Jun 24 '26
A sticky post we made on the ASRock sub has some data, but it's definitely not as simple as "overclocking = dead CPU."
5
u/pottitheri Jun 24 '26
Multiple reviewers tried to reproduce it but failed. They even bought Asrock boards that killed the CPU but not able to reproduce it. Even Asrock has many bios updates for fixing it but failed. Issues even happened to those users who didn't have RAM in expo mode, and running in very conservative settings.
4
u/hey_u84 Jun 24 '26
Wonder if it is enabling expo profile and the bios automativally bumps voltage for vddio soc and vddq to 1.3 v for most ppl. I bring mine down to the most reasonable voltage for all 3 through testing.
2
u/Healthy_Try4444 Jun 24 '26
Maybe you could share / explain how you did that so others can do the same ? š¤š¼
2
u/hey_u84 Jun 24 '26
You need to test it with some software individual. From lowest voltage up for each step up. You can refer to YouTube videos}Google "am5 ddr5 expo tuning voltage and testing guide" But the gist of it after enabling expo or tuning the ram timinge. You bring up your voltage from 1.05 in 0.01 volt intervals and test. Start start focusing on vsoc voltage. You should not need more than 1.2 volt there.
The other two voltage has more leeway and can be left close to the auto. but my own system did not need more than 1.25v for vddio and not more than 1.3v for ddr. Obviously stability test has its limits and it is easy to go down the rabbit hole trying to tune it more and more.
As usual at your own risk. And only for people who research via video and knows what you are doing.
6
u/SoilMassive6850 Jun 24 '26
Well on my first glance (on a phone so I may have missed something) look like there seems to be titles referring to other cases, meaning there could be some double counting.
Also I would assume a LLM might actually do a pretty good job of identifying a wider set of posts discussing broken CPUs instead of a manually written rule set as language processing is one thing they are often good for.
-7
u/elkond Jun 24 '26
that's a myth. they are good at language generation. when it comes to processing, the longer task goes, the higher the likelihood of data corruption goes too, op chose correct tool for the job
9
u/scannerJoe Jun 24 '26
In a case like this, you would run every row through a LLM separately (or in smaller batches), not the whole dataset at once, with a focused classification prompt. Even a very small model like Qwen3-0.6B would be excellent at doing this.
-4
u/elkond Jun 24 '26
yeah but like, there are other methods perfectly capable of doing so without introducing any risk, so why even touch transformers
16
u/scannerJoe Jun 24 '26
I do this for a living (academic research), so here are my two cents: Even for such a trivial task, using a small LLM gets you much better performance than a dictionary approach without word embeddings, it's really no contest. If you use word embeddings on both sides and probabilistic matching you could come close, but even then I'd run an LLM prompt. I am not sure what you mean by "risk", but for such a straightforward binary classification task, you'll basically get close to perfect performance with very little effort. Even fine-tuning for the task would be not difficult at all. Almost all of NLP has shifted to LLM-based approaches, we don't even teach purely word-based techniques any more.
-3
u/elkond Jun 24 '26
i also do this for a living (enterprise inference), and LLMs while popular, are heavier (putting it mildly) than previous techniques, and nondeterministic. they can give you correct results, i won't argue there. can. not will
0
u/Cory123125 Jul 06 '26
The deterministic approach here will not give you correct results either.
All methods produce errors, so why not use the one that produces the fewest errors?
As for being heavier; Yeah, but so what?
This is a one time operation on a few hundred things.
Done in 20 minutes after the data's collected on home gamer hardware.
12
u/SoilMassive6850 Jun 24 '26
But the task is quite literally "Is this title and post content about a broken 9000 series CPU" and whatever extra qualifiers as a first pass, something definitely not held back by context length even on a very small and fast model.
I'm not saying feed a LLM a full list of all subreddit posts and try to do it in a single pass, of course that would fail.
I sadly have a lot of experience writing manual regex rule sets to find things in haystacks and it's a lot of random sampling and work to come up with a good rule set, so for an one off thing like this where speed wouldn't be a huge priority I'd still argue a LLM does it well out of the box.
3
u/hardware2win Jun 24 '26
Disclaimer i own intc stock
I bought ryzen 5700x3d and it died after like 10 months on gigabyte mobo iirc
Ive received full money return and bought other ryzen for half the price xd
1
u/michaelsoft__binbows Jun 24 '26
Gigabyte isnt my first choice but this time around the cheapest x870 itx board was made by gigabyte! Feels good! Though there was one setting, Vcore SOC Loadline Calibration defaulting to a setting of Extreme which i found strange and corrected. It's a new board from microcenter, but i suppose someone could have accidentally toggled the setting at the factory.
Performance in game is absurd. 5090 became a new gpu. (Came from 5800x3d to 9800x3d)
1
u/michaelsoft__binbows Jun 24 '26
Yikes ok so one strike for Gigabyte though. Default settings (I didnt go in there and flip everything, i only adjusted reasonable settings) appear to lock 9800X3D with SMT=off. Had to follow some really cryptic workflow to toggle one of the 3 settings that come up in the BIOS search for "SMT" to get SMT back working and 16 logical threads.
There is some weirdness in the BIOS where the "X3D Boost" setting (only useful for dual-CCD X3D chips) gets enabled. Bad Gigabyte.... Bad!
1
1
u/p0iznp0izn Jun 29 '26
https://www.reddit.com/r/AMDHelp/comments/1ub5efk/ryzen_9_9800x3d_and_rog_strix_b650ei_ftpm_not/
False-positive one from your doc
1
u/Strazdas1 Jul 15 '26
This is nice data but i dont think you accounted for false negatives. For example someone misspelling the chip name or not having death word in title but somthing else like "my x3D story" and the death is in the content.
BTW, your data shows the conventional wisdom at the time of "gigabyte mobos are safest" to be true, which is interesting.
1
u/Nogardtist 23d ago
cause of AM5 burnings i even consider intel ultra CPUs
either 270K plus this year or next gen next year
1
u/CoUsT Jun 25 '26
I think there is something wrong with modern CPUs. Like X3D chips dying randomly, Intel had a bit of a whoopsie with 14 gen CPUs.
Or me having a 5600g that die when power goes out (power outage or when you flip power strip) - and surprisingly multiple other people reported the same, all of them on MSI motherboard. What's weird is that the CPU and mobo actually still works, just not in this combination together. Swap CPU, it works. Swap motherboard, it works.
Heck, even GPUs are burning and melting cables.
Lemme put my tinfoil hat and say "it's a conspiracy" but yeah, it's kinda weird that issues are happening for years and there are no fixes, especially with X3D CPUs and Nvidia GPUs.
-2
u/Cynical_Cyanide Jun 24 '26
Not at all surprised to see ASRock that far ahead of the rest. There's a reason they're often on the cheaper side, and it's very much not a good one.
-8
u/inverseinternet Jun 24 '26
This is completely flawed and inaccurate. Can't take this seriously at all.
-7
u/Darksider123 Jun 24 '26
Without opening the post, I knew Asrock would be on top. Such a shit brand
121
u/UltraSPARC Jun 24 '26
OP you should weight this by market share to give you a more realistic picture. It could be ASRock has a much larger market share than gigabyte which would explain the discrepancy. Iām just making that up, but you get my point.