Over the weekend, reports started pouring in on sites like Reddit From many owners of PCs with AMD Ryzen 7000 series CPUs. They reported that the chips were overheating and even burning inside their motherboards. While these issues seem to occur more specifically with the Ryzen 7000X3D, they are also occurring in other PCs with other Ryzen 7000 series CPUs.
AMD has been pretty quiet about these issues so far. however, Tom’s Hardware has published an article using several anonymous sources, which has more information on what might be causing these CPUs to burn. It says the problem is higher than normal SOC voltages. It states:
This can be calculated either from the pre-programmed voltages used in the EXPO memory overclocking profiles or when the user manually adjusts the SoC voltages (a common practice to extract a bit more memory overclocking headroom).
The article also claims that these high SoC voltage levels can “destroy thermal sensors and thermal protection mechanisms” in Ryzen 7000 chips. These features are supposed to prevent CPUs from overheating, but if they don’t work because of high voltage, it can obviously cause uncontrolled burns.
The article claims that AMD is working on a solution to these issues, which will include a voltage cap for the chip’s firmware, but adds that motherboard manufacturers can still allow voltage variations. are Some motherboard manufacturers such as ASUS and MSI has released BIOS updates designed to help prevent these issues on the YouTube Tech Channel Der8auer Received a statement from ASUS on the issue:
The EFI updates posted on Friday include some specific thermal monitoring mechanisms we’ve implemented to help protect boards and CPUs. We removed the old BIOS for this reason and also because manual Vcore control was available on previous builds. We are also working with AMD on AMD Expo and defining new rules for SoC voltage. We will release new updates for this ASAP. Bear with us.
In the meantime, owners of PCs with AMD Ryzen 7000 series chips can take some precautions:
If you use the EXPO profile, you should check your SoC voltage in your BIOS or with a utility like HWiNFO. If it is at 1.4V or higher, you should disable the profile and run the memory at standard stock settings. If you manually dialed in the SoC voltage to 1.4V or higher, dial it back to a safe setting for now.
We’ll update this post if and when AMD releases an official statement.
