News Third Ryzen 7 9800X3D burnout case appears, kills the CPU, and damages the motherboard socket

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As something that loosely follow the gist of the story, this past weekend I wanted to clean off and re-apply thermal grease on my 5800X. It turned out my alcohol wipe was too damped and some liquid (70% IPA) sipped into the CPU socket.

I didn't initially notice it, tried to power on, and nothing happened. Realized what I could have done, I panicked a little. Disconnected power and took everything off. Sure enough, the CPU socket was wet. Despite being an atheist, I prayed to all kind of deities I could think of for the next 5 minutes while letting things dry.

Fortunately, after that everything powered on without any further incidents.
 
A few bad chips are pretty much expected in any batch of CPUs. Failure rates are just part of the game. As long as the numbers remain low I don't see an issue. If the numbers jump over time though AMD may have a design/production issue that was missed in testing. All we can do is play the wait and see game at this point. But considering the teething issues with the 7000 series CPUs, I'll be keeping an eye on how this plays out in the near to long term. We have two 7950X3Ds running with 64GB of DDR5 6000mhz CL 30 running Expo on x670 Taichi boards with no issues but we waited until AMD and it's board partners had everything under control so we didn't melt a chip. As such I make sure I keep up to date on everything AM5 as I do intend to upgrade to Zen 6 after it launches, has time to mature and sale prices begin to bring its cost down. Side note...I am curious to find out if the leaked 12 core CCDs are actually a thing for Zen 6. Regardless I appreciate Tom's keeping us up to date on potential pitfalls in the tech world.
 
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The damage pattern looks to me like a piece of debris could've been involved. Or, maybe some of the springs got slightly mashed when something bumped into the empty socket, and weren't making proper contact.

The main question such explanations pose is how it took so long to fail, and why it failed when he was allegedly just watching a video.
 
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bit_user said:
The damage pattern looks to me like a piece of debris could've been involved.
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Might not be the same issue but sure looks a lot alike.
www.igorslab.de

Pin analysis of the destroyed Ryzen 7800X3D - All burned pins supply the VDDCR (CPU Core Power Supply) | igor´sLAB

The process with the destroyed Ryzen 7000X3D CPUs has of course already interested me and I didn’t want to just cover a news and that was it. So I took the damage picture from Reddit and put the back…
www.igorslab.de www.igorslab.de
Damage-Small-1-934x980.jpg
 
According to the Reddit thread he could have possibly been using a beta BIOS, which could have caused the issue.

Also looking at the image he posted on Reddit in its full zoom I'm not seeing any "debris". It's slightly fuzzy but the CPU pads appear to be scorched or missing, while the pins in the socket appear to be bent sideways or melted, as you would expect if it were an electrical short, and combined with JPEG compression, camera flash, and phone camera processing it appears to be slightly different colors, and could easily be the CPU pads having been fused to the socket pins, that would be the shape of the pads.

My money would be on a beta BIOS overvolt, I'm not so sure a mis-manufactured socket pin causing an electric arc would have lasted weeks, as I can't see pins slowly bending over time towards each other until they touched.
 
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If after some time of using the CPU, the user did something to the CPU to introduce the foreign object, turned the system on and fried the CPU; are we expecting him to admit to doing that and thus voiding his warranty? Of course he is going to say the CPU was running fine for a long time and then magically fired itself.

I think it was Gamer's Nexus that bought the first burned out CPU from the owner, did an extensive analysis of what they found and posted a video about it. Basically, the previous owner didn't alight the CPU to the socket correctly. He fried it, then made a lot of noise about.
 
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dalek1234 said:
If after some time of using the CPU, the user did something to the CPU to introduce the foreign object, turned the system on and fried the CPU; are we expecting him to admit to doing that and thus voiding his warranty? Of course he is going to say the CPU was running fine for a long time and then magically fired itself.

I think it was Gamer's Nexus that bought the first burned out CPU from the owner, did an extensive analysis of what they found and posted a video about it. Basically, the previous owner didn't alight the CPU to the socket correctly. He fried it, then made a lot of noise about.
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Indeed. Thousands of 9800x3d chips running for months without any issues and one random guy claiming on reddit that he didn't do anything wrong and the chip just burnt by itself after three weeks. The odds are that this guy did a bad manipulation, panicked after the chip burnt and immediately posted everything on reddit to get attention and secure his RMA.
 
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JayGau said:
Indeed. Thousands of 9800x3d chips running for months without any issues and one random guy claiming on reddit that he didn't do anything wrong and the chip just burnt by itself after three weeks. The odds are that this guy did a bad manipulation, panicked after the chip burnt and immediately posted everything on reddit to get attention and secure his RMA.
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Whether the user did anything wrong or not, a couple isolated incidents should not cause any concern. The defect rate of CPUs or motherboard is never zero.

Unlike the 7800X3D problem, that came to light shortly after launch, these CPUs have been in wide use for like 3 months. That's more than enough time for any sort of systemic issue like this to surface. So, either something happened with this user's CPU or motherboard (possibly during installation, possibly during production) or he just got unlucky and received either a rare defective CPU or mobo.

I am a little uncomfortable with some of the narratives around the owner. I think we should try to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume his story is probably accurate (while still allowing for the possibility that it's not).
 
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JayGau said:
Indeed. Thousands of 9800x3d chips running for months without any issues and one random guy claiming on reddit that he didn't do anything wrong and the chip just burnt by itself after three weeks. The odds are that this guy did a bad manipulation, panicked after the chip burnt and immediately posted everything on reddit to get attention and secure his RMA.
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Exactly

AMD sold so many of those, that if they had and issue, we'd be seeing thousands of such cases.

Hey, I'm guilty myself. I've done some stupid stuff to my hardware, broke it, and then RMA'ed it pretending I've done nothing. Probably most here are guilty as charged.
 
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dalek1234 said:
Hey, I'm guilty myself. I've done some stupid stuff to my hardware, broke it, and then RMA'ed it pretending I've done nothing. Probably most here are guilty as charged.
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The worst I ever did was to RMA a perfectly good CPU and motherboard, because they benchmarked way off what I was expecting. It turned out that I had misunderstood what I was trying to compare them with and I mistakenly concluded there was something wrong.

As that was 15 years ago, I hope the statute of limitations has expired!
; )
 
bit_user said:
The worst I ever did was to RMA a perfectly good CPU and motherboard, because they benchmarked way off what I was expecting. It turned out that I had misunderstood what I was trying to compare them with and I mistakenly concluded there was something wrong.

As that was 15 years ago, I hope the statute of limitations has expired!
; )
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😂 We can laugh at ourselves now that we are wiser, can't we.
 
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bit_user said:
Whether the user did anything wrong or not, a couple isolated incidents should not cause any concern. The defect rate of CPUs or motherboard is never zero.

Unlike the 7800X3D problem, that came to light shortly after launch, these CPUs have been in wide use for like 3 months. That's more than enough time for any sort of systemic issue like this to surface. So, either something happened with this user's CPU or motherboard (possibly during installation, possibly during production) or he just got unlucky and received either a rare defective CPU or mobo.

I am a little uncomfortable with some of the narratives around the owner. I think we should try to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume his story is probably accurate (while still allowing for the possibility that it's not).
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I agree it could likely be an isolated defective chip and the user may have nothing to do with the incident aside being very unlucky. We don't know. I went fast on the trigger to blame the user, but the way the tech sites and youtubers are covering this, like "oh no the 9800X3D are frying" and putting this isolated case in the same basket as the nvidia terrible launch with big titles like "It's a very bad time for PC hardware" is really pissing me off and I guess I needed to find an easy culprit to blame.
 
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dalek1234 said:
Exactly

AMD sold so many of those, that if they had and issue, we'd be seeing thousands of such cases.

Hey, I'm guilty myself. I've done some stupid stuff to my hardware, broke it, and then RMA'ed it pretending I've done nothing. Probably most here are guilty as charged.
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Why? Raptor Lake issues didn't appear immediately, it took a long time to become a huge problem. It could just be a dud cpu, or a dud install, or a dud bios, so I'm not saying anything on the matter.
 
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Mr Majestyk said:
Raptor Lake issues didn't appear immediately, it took a long time to become a huge problem.
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They also didn't catastrophically fail.

From how it sounds, this user doesn't quite fit the profile of the sort of power user I'd expect to trip over a system problem of this sort, first. Of course, we can't rule out the possibility of a systemic problem, but it seems unlikely to me.
 
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