Gamers Nexus deep dive on Asrock motherboards killing Ryzen CPUs

Well that's annoying, been eyeing up an AM5 upgrade at some point soon, but most of the boards that I like the appearance/features of without being crazy expensive are ASRock :(
 
One ASRock B850 Pro RS motherboard reportedly kills three ryzen 7 9700x cpus.

videocardz.com | Posted on 3 November 2025 said:
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.

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.
Click to expand...

Source: Videocardz QuasarZone Reddit
 
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Definitely a curious situation, I'm far from convinced it is simply the ASRock motherboard(s) killing the CPUs though as while far far less common the same manner of failure is seen on other brands and it is still happening, but at a lower frequency, on newer BIOS.
 
2 years with my B650E Taichi Lite and 8 months now with the 9700x CPU. No issues. BIOS updated each time a new one is released all the way from like 1.28. I must be doing something wrong. :p
 
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I’ve been running 9950X3D in a Non ‘E’ X870 PG Nova (which is a new, revised board) for about a month now on BIOS 3.5 without any issues. Only yesterday I did some tweaking though, reducing the SOC voltage from 1.2 to 1.1 MV with a small offset which has reduced the temps by circa 10C on a 360mm AIO.

So far, so good.
 
How long does it take for things to go wrong? I've been running my 9800X3D for most of the year in an ASRock X870E Taichi Lite without it blowing up yet.
 
Doesn't seem to be much consistency which is one of the strange things about it - some people have destroyed 2 CPUs in the space of weeks, others have had 1+ years before it happens.
 
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