Over the weekend, reports started to come in on sites like Reddit from many owners of PCs with AMD Ryzen 7000 series CPUs. They stated the chips were overheating and even burning up inside their motherboards. While the issues appear to be happening 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 problems so far. However, Tom's Hardware has posted an article, using multiple unnamed sources, that has more information on what might be causing these CPUs to burn out. It says the issue is with higher-than-normal SoC voltages. It states:

This can be imposed from either the pre-programmed voltages used in EXPO memory overclocking profiles or when a user manually adjusts the SoC voltages (a common practice to eke out a bit more memory overclocking headroom).

The article also claims that these higher SoC voltage levels can "destroy thermal sensors and thermal protection mechanisms" in the Ryzen 7000 chips. These features are supposed to prevent overheating of CPUs, but if they don't work due to the higher voltage, this can obviously cause an uncontrollable burn up.

Read more: Many AMD Ryzen 7000 CPUs are reportedly burning up, but a fix may be in the works - Neowin

Posted By: Brink
25 Apr 2023