Memory overclocking being blamed for AMD Ryzen chips burning themselves to death
Following initial reports of Ryzen 7000-series processors burning out(opens in new tab) under certain conditions, we now have a little more information on what might be causing these chips' untimely deaths.
In a statement to Der8auer(opens in new tab), Asus notes that it has added new thermal monitoring mechanisms to protect chips. The statement goes on to mention AMD Expo and SoC voltage, which appears to suggest these may have some connection with the issues reported so far.
«The EFI updates posted on Friday contain some dedicated thermal monitoring mechanisms we've implemented to help protect the boards and CPUs. We removed older BIOSes for that reason and also because manual Vcore control was available on previous builds. We're also working with AMD on defining new rules for AMD Expo and SoC voltage. We'll issue new updates for that ASAP. Please bear with us,» Asus spokesperson, Rajinder Gill, says.
The issue has been linked to excessive SoC voltages, as Tom's Hardware(opens in new tab) notes, and can be exposed via either AMD EXPO profiles, for memory overclocking, or via manual adjustment in the BIOS.
EXPO memory profiles are used to run DDR5 memory at advertised overclocking speeds, akin to Intel's XMP profiles, and do so by increasing memory clocks and voltages to accommodate, including SoC voltage.
According to Tom's sources, the issue may actually lie in this excessive voltage destroying or disabling the thermal protection mechanisms on the chip and thus allowing it to continue operating without thermal limits to slow itself down and protect it from overheating. That's a thought shared by Der8auer, who also believes that the thermal protection on affected chips died and that led to further heat damage until a
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