This gaming motherboard reportedly destroyed two AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPUs

One unlucky gamer has reported that their ASRock motherboard has fried not one, but two AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D gaming CPUs. According to the report, despite already claiming a replacement CPU from AMD for the first burned-out 9800X3D, the gamer has now seen a second one fail using the same ASRock board.

Worryingly, it looks like this gamer was also running the recent ASRock motherboard BIOS update that the company believed fixed this issue. The 9800X3D is our favorite choice for gamers right now, topping our best gaming CPU list, but if you're using it with an ASRock motherboard, you'll want to make sure it's up-to-date with the latest BIOS updates first.

Posting on the r/ASRock subreddit, user RedYourDead confirmed that the ASRock B850i Lightning WiFi motherboard they were using was running a factory default BIOS when the first 9800X3D failed. This second failure, however, occurred running with BIOS version 3.25, which featured "optimized PBO settings" that should have resolved the error.

Although ASRock hasn't formally commented, its engineers did speak off the record at Computex 2025 to YouTuber Tech Yes City about the problem earlier this year. Those engineers believed that the current supplied to the CPU using AMD's Precision Boost Override (PBO) was behind the problem.

PBO is a feature used by Ryzen CPUs to adjust your voltage and clock speed limits automatically for best performance. According to the ASRock engineers, the default power settings on these motherboards for AMD Ryzen 9000 series CPUs were "too aggressive" initially.

ASRock's engineers confirmed that a change had been made to adjust so-called hidden voltage settings, or "shadow voltages" as it called them, to bring the electric design current and thermal design current limits for PBO down to meet AMD's design specs for these CPUs. That, it believed, would fix the problem, and it released these new fixes via BIOS update 3.25. However, RedYourDead has said they were running this BIOS version when their second CPU failure occurred.

One possible reason for the continued failure is that RedYourDead used the same board with both CPUs, so it's possible that the board itself was damaged following the first failure. That could mean that ASRock's fix for the issue has in fact worked, but there's no clear answer yet.

Neither ASRock or AMD have commented on the failure so far, but we'll be hoping this is an isolated incident. If you're running a 9800X3D on an ASRock motherboard, we'd strongly recommend updating your BIOS to the most recent version available, which you can download from the ASRock website for your particular board.

Suddenly contemplating a new board upgrade? Make sure to check out our best gaming motherboard guide next for solid AMD and Intel-focused options to suit any budget. You can also check out our AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D review to see why this CPU is still our favorite for gamers.

You can start a conversation about this tricky ASRock issue, especially if you've been affected, over on our Discord server.