The root cause for the damaged Ryzen 7000 3D CPUs has just been identified. A few days ago, when a user posted his dead 7800X3D and motherboard pics on Reddit, more such cases followed that were identical to this user.
The problem was that the 3D CPUs were getting burned and bulged out at a specific place due to high temperatures. As identified by Buildzoid and several others, these CPUs were getting damaged on the CCD side because of poor thermals.
Some Ryzen 7000 package layout/orientation guidelines. I've mostly made this so I stop using the 7800X3D on my desk to compare against pictures of broken CPUs. pic.twitter.com/nVgZpDl4PI
— Buildzoid (@Buildzoid1) April 25, 2023
As many such complaints piled up, Asus just gave its official statement that states that they have removed older BIOSes because they were giving manual Vcore Control, and according to Der8auer, all the affected cases had one thing in common which was the usage of AMD EXPO.
EXPO was reportedly the root cause of this problem because when it is turned on it increases the CPU SOC and VCore voltage to 1.4 Volts and in some cases up to 1.5V which has been proved to be deadly for 3D CPUs.
Furthermore, According to Tomshardware, when the voltage is increased to such a high number, it destroys the chip’s thermal sensors as well as thermal protection mechanisms due to which the CPU goes on operating without knowing its temperature before it dies.
It should also be kept in mind that 3D CPUs are not alone that facing this problem because it is universal across all the Ryzen 7000 CPUs. The reason why non-3D CPUs are not going dead is because of their better thermals and higher operating temperatures.
Right now all the motherboard manufacturers have acknowledged this problem in their BIOS and some of them have already taken steps in order to protect 3D CPUs from this damage.
I personally find it negligence on the part of AMD and its board partners because it’s not the first time we have been seeing such weird problems with 3D CPUs and considering that they don’t cover the damage done through EXPO overclocking in their warranty is surely not a good move.
