ASRock B850 board takes three Ryzen CPUs to the grave
With the company dead silent on any recalls, some users already experienced two CPUs dead on a single board. But this report from QuasarZone means we have a first case of three dead CPUs on one motherboard.
A South Korean PC user has shared what appears to be the first reported case of three Ryzen 7 9700X CPUs allegedly dying on a single motherboard. The story was posted on Korean forum Quasar Zone and later surfaced on Reddit, focusing on an ASRock B850 Pro RS board and repeated failures with the same CPU model.
According to the thread, the owner installed two Ryzen 7 9700X processors bought from AliExpress around February. Both chips reportedly failed on the ASRock B850 Pro RS. In early August he switched to a third 9700X purchased from an official Korean retailer, Compuzone, and saw the same symptoms again. The retail CPU was later diagnosed as defective during RMA.
The user says the system ran at stock settings the whole time. No XMP, no manual overclocking. He also states that he used BIOS Flashback and always updated to the latest firmware as soon as it was posted . In the discussion he mentions running BIOS 3.40 when the problems began and now plans to move to BIOS 3.50, which ASRock Korea reportedly described as an AGESA update.
Source: QuasarZone (translation)
Complicating the situation, the motherboard had already been inspected once by ASRock after the two AliExpress CPUs failed. At that time the service center found no issues and returned the board as normal. After the third CPU failure, the board and the retail processor were sent back through Compuzone for another round of service, and the user is now waiting on the outcome.
For now this remains an unconfirmed user report (no photos were shared). There is no recall and no public statement from ASRock on this specific case.
I guess at this point one may wonder, at what point should a user just switch to a new board?
Source: QuasarZone via Reddit
