"There's surely more to come from this story," I said back in February and sure enough ASRock has a new blog post addressing reports of toasted AMD Ryzen 9000-chips in X870 motherboards. It turns out the problem might be, somewhat suitably, crumbs.
It seems one of the problematic X870 motherboards from the Reddit post we mentioned last time around has made its way back to ASRock for analysis. The results weren't quite what we might have expected.
To quote the operative passage from the ASRock blog post in full, "A retrieved motherboard was in a system where the CPU showed burn damage. When inspecting this motherboard, we found that the motherboard does not have obvious damage nor burn marks around the VRM area. Measurements of the motherboard are also within spec. After cleaning and removing debris from the CPU socket, without further repair, the motherboard can boot up successfully with original onboard BIOS. It also passed long-term stress tests."
Where there is toast, you'll always find crumbs, then? Something like that. Of course, a single motherboard doesn't make for comprehensive statistical analysis. Moreover, debris in the CPU socket doesn't address the wider problem of some X870 boards reportedly failing to boot.
Here, ASRock has a new BIOS that's claimed to finally solve that issue. "With some BIOS versions, we have noticed some systems are not being able to boot with random 9000-series CPUs. BIOS 3.20 fixes this issue by improving memory compatibility," ASRock says.
However, the company is also keen to emphasise that its BIOS builds do not cause CPU damage. "The release of BIOS 3.20 is not related to the CPU damage issue. All BIOS versions including earlier iterations will not cause CPU damage," the blog post says.
The blog post has before and after images, the latter still apparently showing some residuals signs of where the debris presumably caused the socket and CPU to short out. If anything, the fact the the board still boots and runs normally, according to ASRock at least, it a testament to its engineering robustness.
There's no word on the CPU in question, so we assume that remains an ex chip. It's notable that ASRock says that it is, "taking these incidents seriously and [has] reached out to many of the affected users to gather information. We have obtained some of the motherboards for thorough inspection."
For now, ASRock has revealed what it found regarding any other toasted motherboards and chips it has recovered. So, it's not clear if there's any pattern here. Watch this space, then, for another round of AMD chips and toast.
