In short: An obvious bug has been found in the motherboard management software from several leading motherboard vendors, which makes it incredibly easy to fry your AMD X3D-based processor. We don’t have a schedule yet for when the protections will be installed, so until then, be very careful fiddling with the motherboard management software with these chips. One mistake — and your processor can become a brilliant decoration of the table.
Igor’s lab recently stumbled upon a problem while messing with the MSI Center. Using the MSI B550 Unify board with AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D processor, Igor noticed that the software apparently defines the chip as a standard Ryzen 5xxx, which does not have a 3D L3 cache with a vertical arrangement.
The additional cache is known to boost gaming performance, but its physical presence also negatively affects heat dissipation, which is one of the reasons it comes with a lower clock speed than the standard 5800X.
Since the software cannot detect the X3D chip, it treats it as a standard Ryzen 5xxx and allows for virtually unhindered manipulation of the core multiplier and core voltage. Intrigued, Igor fiddled with the voltage settings and quickly killed the processor. He didn’t mention how much power was put into the chip to take its life, but Tom’s Hardware notes that the core voltage can be set up to 1.55 V.
Worse, an obvious error was found in similar control software from ASRock, Asus and Gigabyte.
Just last week, the well-known der8auer overclocker tried its hand at overclocking and overstressing AMD Ryzen 7950X3D. Even with liquid nitrogen, the chip instantly died when the core voltage was set to 1.55v. der8auer barely exited the BIOS (and without any significant load) before everything went awry. Needless to say, he was surprised that he died so quickly.
At the very least, it looks like these extreme core voltage settings should contain a strict warning before users are allowed to apply risky settings.
