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AMD Ryzen 7000 Burning Out: Impacts all 7000 processors

159 points by nitinreddy88 3y ago

caycep 3y ago
So this is my latest question: the new BIOS limits SOC voltate at 1.3V, but the whole point of this "DDR5-6000 sweet spot" claim is the ability to run at 1:1 with the memory controller/memory frequency, i.e. 3000 mHz (from DDR5-6000 Mt/s) to 3000mHz UCLK memory control. Infinity fabric, it appears, runs at its own frequency, 2000-ish mHz or something like that and is not tied to above. So: with the BIOS limit to 1.3V SOC, will the max memory controller frequency be less than 3000 mHz? Is the new sweet spot then something like DDR5-5600?
Aleklart 3y ago
What di you expect? It is a hot product.
givemeethekeys 3y ago
> According to our sources and seconded by an ASUS statement to Der8auer, the problem stems from SoC voltages being altered to unsafe higher levels. This can be imposed from either the pre-programmed voltages used to support 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). Does that mean, as long as I don't overclock, my Ryzen7 CPU will most likely be a-ok?
- metadat 3y ago
  "Probably", but not guaranteed. This isn't a normal thing to have happen, even with overclocked chips. The temperature sensors used for thermal protection aren't usually the first thing to break.
  - ilyt 3y ago
    It might not be temperature sensor itself but circuitry measuring it. Yeah sensor is "just a diode" but that needs amplifier and ADC to get to the rest of the system
- caycep 3y ago
  What I'm not sure of is DDR5 - it had seemed DDR5 offered more flexibility in voltage/speeds, i.e. the "stock" ddr5 speeds at 1.2V seemed conservative compared to 1.35 or 1.5V for DDR3 or DDR4. But if going about 1.2V or whatever voltage DDR5-6000 EXPO profiles are setting, also necessitates increasing SOC/CPU voltage...maybe it's better to hang back and just stick w/ DDR5-5200 or 5400 or something like that.
- kimixa 3y ago
  I think this is a bit of a stretch from tomshardware, as if you actually read the statement https://i.imgur.com/pM358j6.jpg https://i.imgur.com/pM358j6.jpg it doesn't actually say what the problem is, or even that there is a problem. Just they released a new BIOS that has more limitations. And the other "evidence" of a photo of a damaged pin pad on a ryzen processor shows the damaged pins aren't related to the SoC rail mentioned in the article.
  - JimBo72 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - kimixa 3y ago
      The only thing I can see in the article that supports that is: "Our sources also added further details about the nature of the chip failures — in some cases, excessive SoC voltages destroy the chips' thermal sensors and thermal protection mechanisms, completely disabling its only means of detecting and protecting itself from overheating" And "Our Sources" aren't motherboard vendor statements, none of the statements from motherboard vendors or AMD themselves support this theory, so we're relying on Tom's unnamed "sources" rather than any public evidence or statement. This is exactly what I dislike - the slow removal of the source and quality of evidence and information. It's Toms being bad too, as their statement "seconded by an ASUS statement to Der8auer, the problem stems from SoC voltages" does not seem a good representation of the actual statement - the image of which I linked.
      - JimBo72 3y ago
        ASUS pointing out that they are defining new rules for vCore and SoC voltage to address these issues is in fact pointing to that as the issue. They aren't just "throwing that in there" because it is unrelated. If you need it to be even more direct, here is the statement from ASUS that says it is SoC voltage. https://twitter.com/ASUSTechMKTJJ/status/1650920434404331520 https://twitter.com/ASUSTechMKTJJ/status/1650920434404331520 Here is the statement from Biostar that says SoC voltages are being limited: https://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en/news/news.php?S_ID=559 https://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en/news/news.php?S_ID=559 You've admitted that you work for AMD, which would make a casual observer think that you are being biased in your comments. There is verifiable proof of the correlation with SoC voltage from the ODMs themselves.
- pixl97 3y ago
  I guess that depends on the nature of the failure and the fragility of the part. If you're staying inside the recommended voltage its likely the product will have a long life. For example look at the life curve of capacitors (and I'm not talking the diseased ones we had to deal with in the 2000s). The 'hotter' we run them the shorter their lifespan is. Now what can be difficult to figure out via testing is to figure out the MTBF when you have a hard cutoff point for failure that's not very much higher than standard operating specs. We could be failing at 100 hours at 1.4v, and 10,000 hours at 1.3v. Or it could last 100,000 hours at 1.3v.
- kaelinl 3y ago
  My reading of the statement (and understanding of other reporting on this subject) is that EXPO alone can trigger this issue. Calling EXPO overclocking feels somewhat disingenuous to me. EXPO is akin to Intel's XMP. The RAM stick reports timings and other settings that it can handle and then the motherboard/user selects one to use. The profiles are needed because the official JEDEC standard for DDR doesn't provide a mechanism for running up to the frequencies that modern RAM uses; e.g. if you buy a DDR5 6000MHz kit, it'll only run at 4800MHz or thereabouts until you enable EXPO/XMP. RAM is really never expected to be run at the base frequency (without EXPO/XMP). If you buy a prebuilt, it'll have EXPO/XMP enabled, and if you build yourself you always should be enabling it. If you have a RAM kit that's somewhat recent and don't have it enabled, you've likely wasted money on the RAM. Intel has attempted to claim that XMP was overclocking and violated their warranty but my understanding is that they quickly backed off.
  - TacticalCoder 3y ago
    > My reading of the statement (and understanding of other reporting on this subject) is that EXPO alone can trigger this issue. Calling EXPO overclocking feels somewhat disingenuous to me. Totally. With DDR5-6000, it's even nastier: AMD repeatedly said that DDR5-6000 was the "sweet spot". I never overclocked any computer of mine but I did buy DDR5-6000 for my 7700X because AMD said it was the sweet spot. And I turned EXPO on so that it'd run at 6000, not 4800. And now, after saying 6000 was the "sweet spot", they try to word things as if EXPO was somehow overclocking!?
    - Ciantic 3y ago
      I'm in same boat. I payed a premium for DDR5-6000 64GB for my 7950X, because AMD said it's the sweet spot... I didn't ever consider this "overclocking", I haven't ever been interested on overclocking, I just want stable machine. Now I'm considering disabling EXPO, but I don't think it would work as 6000 anymore after that. I have used this machine for 4 months now, so I'd say it's pretty safe, but who knows, I haven't taxed the CPU with gaming yet.
      - 3y ago
- zamalek 3y ago
  In general, you should be running the EXPO profile: this "upclocks" your RAM. I use the term "upclock" instead of overclock because you aren't pushing your RAM past its manufacturer's limit, you are pushing it to that limit. The JEDEC profile (the opposite of EXPO) is extremely conservative and can significantly affect performance. This effect is compounded with Ryzen because of Infinity Fabric, which is the interconnect between the chiplets in the CPU. IF is clocked to the same speed as your RAM - so at the 6000MT/s "sweet spot" the article mentions your IF and RAM bus are running at 3000MHz. Matching IF to RAM bus is so important that increasing the RAM bus clock above the IF clock will decrease performance (unless the RAM bus clock is a multiple of the IF clock). I haven't done the comparison on my 7950x, but on my 3950x running the IF at 1800MHz (RAM at 3600MT/s) resulted in a 10%-30% uplift in performance (depending on the workload). So with Ryzen, if should consider purchasing RAM that is matched to the IF clock. For Ryzen 7 that is 6000MT/s. If you purchased RAM above that, you should definitely decrease the clock to match IF (you can tighten RAM timing to take advantage of the more expensive chips that you purchased, if you have the patience to). What am I doing? I am going to disable EXPO, but I will definitely be re-enabling once this has been resolved. Aside: What is MT/s vs MHz? DDR stands for "double data rate", meaning the MHz that everyone uses to describe the speed of RAM is a misnomer. "6000MHz" RAM actually runs at 3000MHz (but does two transfers per clock cycle). So: Mega-Transfers per Second.
  - ilyt 3y ago
    >In general, you should be running the EXPO profile: this "upclocks" your RAM. I use the term "upclock" instead of overclock because you aren't pushing your RAM past its manufacturer's limit, you are pushing it to that limit. The JEDEC profile (the opposite of EXPO) is extremely conservative and can significantly affect performance. Any source I could find says that EXPO does void warranty, as it is overclocking. https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/expo https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/expo (in footnotes section at the end of page) It might move RAM to it's manufacturer spec as you said but it does it by overclocking CPU > So with Ryzen, if should consider purchasing RAM that is matched to the IF clock. For Ryzen 7 that is 6000MT/s. If you purchased RAM above that, you should definitely decrease the clock to match IF (you can tighten RAM timing to take advantage of the more expensive chips that you purchased, if you have the patience to). Do you know any good benchmark (preferably Linux one) that would show those differences? I will be getting 7800X3D in few days so I want to test it for a bit. > What am I doing? I am going to disable EXPO, but I will definitely be re-enabling once this has been resolved. The core of the issue seems to be "just" overvolting so I'm guessing any manual overclock would still be fine. I have no need for it now (just puny 1070 to pair it with for now), but yeah, wait for new BIOS firmware seems to be best option. > Aside: What is MT/s vs MHz? DDR stands for "double data rate", meaning the MHz that everyone uses to describe the speed of RAM is a misnomer. "6000MHz" RAM actually runs at 3000MHz (but does two transfers per clock cycle). So: Mega-Transfers per Second. Not exactly. The specified speed is only speed of the bus between memory and CPU, not the speed of memory chip itself. DDR4 3200 and DDR5 6400 have exact same internal speed (400MHz) and this is why there isn't much of latency improvement between generations (DDR5 does have some other tricks for latency). Also the 6400MHz is actual speed data is put on the bus, even if clock is half of that. It's pretty much entirely so the RAM chips don't have some insane number of pins but something manageable.
- teirce 3y ago
  Vendors are putting out updated BIOS that limit voltage going to the chips. Based on internet hearsay, even some of the non-OC chips were getting wrecked by stock BIOS overvolting enough. The real concern is with the X3D chips which are particularly sensitive to voltage and not particularly meant to be overclocked. I think you're fine as long as you flash an updated BIOS put out by your MB manufacturer.
- a3w 3y ago
  Derachtauer is a strange name. Is that guy called Kevin Achtauer,or what?
  - zen_1 3y ago
    It's a stand in for "Der Bauer", and I think the guy's name is Roman
  - anticensor 3y ago
    His real name is Roman Hartung.
- paulmd 3y ago
  If you enable Expo/XMP then AMD considers that an overclock (GD-106/GD-112). https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/gamingdetails https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/gamingdetails That’s the root of the problem seemingly - going past the official spec (5200 MT/s for 2 sticks, 3600 MT/s for 4 sticks) requires additional voltage to the memory controller and it’s not uncommon for motherboards to automatically punch up the voltages when you turn on XMP or Expo. You requested the board to overclock after all, they’re just helping you get it stable without tinkering! It’s completely legal from the mobo vendor’s perspective to enable more voltage in “auto-OC” scenarios and they are in fact incentivized to do so by the possibility of returns and negative reviews/bad word of mouth. Customers will remember when “it didn’t work on Asus but I just enabled XMP on MSI and it worked fine”, even if that’s because MSI is punching up voltages. They will see that MSI scores 3% better in whatever benchmark. And AMD themselves in fact advertises benchmarks with Expo enabled, despite the fact that it officially voids the warranty. AMD and Intel (both) have gotten away with this for a long time, having their cake on heavily implying/suggesting it be enabled but technically voiding the warranty if you do (although it's quite unenforced unless you openly tell a warranty agent that you did it). I had a 9900K fail due to simply enabling XMP too, and I’ve seen many reports of early Zen1/Zen+/Zen2 with what seems likely to be IMC failures (they are getting to be "of the age" - 3-5 years with increased VSOC and the memory controllers are just clapped out). DDR4 controllers seem more delicate in general compared to DDR3, and DDR5 requires still higher voltages. It’s almost shocking to hear buildzoid recommend 1.3v VSOC as a “safe” daily driver. AM4 voltages were more like 0.8-1.1v. It also doesn’t help that the early AM5 IO die seems to be terrible. AMD's memory controllers always been worse than Intel even on AM4, but a lot of AM5 chips won’t even post with 4 sticks even at the pedestrian official spec of 3600 MT/s (intel is 3600 MT/s too but they actually work mostly reliably at it, it's a lottery with Zen4). Zen5 is supposed to feature an improved IO die and I wonder if the VSOC will be lower there too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P58VqVvDjxo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P58VqVvDjxo
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    I'll leave my little anecdata with Intel Alder Lake memory controller shenanigans since it's relevant. I built an i7 12700K system last year with 4x16GB DIMMs of DDR5-5600 RAM, for a total of 64GB RAM. Not being fully aware of the memory controller's limitations at that point (moral: read the datasheets!) I turned on XMP which obviously overclocked the RAM to 5600MHz. Note that at this point I was curious why the mobo had booted the system with RAM clocked to 4000MHz prior to my fiddling around with the BIOS. Afterwards, I had instability which manifested in random program and system crashes. Eventually I checked the RAM and confirmed that was the issue with memtest86 returning errors. I read up on the CPU's datasheet and learned that when supplied with 2 DIMMs per channel with 1 rank per DIMM, the memory controller downclocks to 4000MHz as specified. Incidentally, this answered why the mobo booted the system up with RAM clocked to 4000MHz at the beginning. I turned off XMP and backed off the overclock to 4800MHz with timings as applied by the mobo (they're just JEDEC profile timings), and that got me back to stability with subsequent tests in memtest86 returning no errors. The important things to takeaway here are that: * DDR5 memory controllers are still in their infancy compared to DDR4 and DDR3 controllers today, and can't yet deal with so much RAM at once. * Going beyond 1 DIMM per channel, 1 rank per DIMM means the memory controller will run slower than advertised, and this is according to specification. It is on us the end-users to do our homework, we can't forget we are using precision electronics. * With the memory controller running slower, overclocks are that much more taxing than XMP/EXPO and the marketing would imply. Simply turning on XMP/EXPO without thought is dangerous because those profiles do not account for a slower memory controller. * Overclocking is by its very definition running hardware above and beyond what they were designed and rated to operate at. Warranties will be voided, and hardware can be damaged or destroyed because they are operated out of specification. You have been warned, ignorance is not an excuse. * Between CPUs (and GPUs) today coming "over"clocked from the factory to perform at their peak and RAM speed having negligible real world performance implications for the vast majority of use cases, end-user overclocking is simply not worth the hassle unless you absolutely know what you're doing. * EFI/BIOS firmware nearly always come out of the box with safe defaults. If you don't know what you're doing, leaving them alone is perfectly fine. You will still have a very performant system. Overclocking is not for the faint of heart (nor the ignorant!).
xxpor 3y ago
>We are aware of a limited number of reports online claiming that excess voltage while overclocking may have damaged the motherboard socket and pin pads. Well, if the overclocking part is true, shrug. Not that it's great, but it's also not completely unexpected for bad things to happen when you OC.
- wmf 3y ago
  AMD recommends that customers use EXPO then they claim it's warranty-voiding unsafe overclocking.
  - derefr 3y ago
    And doctors recommend safe-injection sites, while also claiming that shooting heroin is unsafe. Shocking! It’s called “harm reduction” — i.e. “if you’re going to do stupid thing X anyway, you may as well use our weak guardrails for it, to hopefully minimize the damage you’re causing compared to doing it through some random third-party solution.”
    - Sakos 3y ago
      Oh please. They advertise their performance based on using things like EXPO. It's insanely anti-consumer for them to turn around and say "if you want to reach the performance we sold you this CPU on, you need to turn in this feature that voids your warranty and could potentially blow up your CPU". I don't understand why you're defending them here.
    - formerly_proven 3y ago
      AMD has generally presented benchmarks with market-typical XMP/A-XMP/EXPO memory; their CPUs benefit more than the competition from that. Now some people have the urge to turn around and go “well why you’d do that, what are you, stupid?” for some reason.
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  "the pre-programmed voltages used to support EXPO memory overclocking profiles" Bad things shouldn't be expected when using pre-programmed voltages. And chips shorting out beyond thermal limits shouldn't be expected ever.
kimixa 3y ago
Ugh, this has exploded on reddit and through a game of telephone seems to have turned a couple of anecdotes, a single photo of a damaged chip, speculation from users and media and a statement saying "We're aware of the reports and are investigating" into a massive issue that is "Confirmed" to affect all processors and spouting advice and recommendations based on it. It's a great example of a hype train and something like citogenesis, each loop through comments and media seems to turn more speculation into fact.
- mastax 3y ago
  It's not "a single photo of a damaged chip" there are at least 4 different public examples that I've seen. Not that it changes the scale of the evidence much. The fact that the vendors are acting so quickly about this suggests to me that they have other non-public examples of the problem (from warranty returns, etc.) and the hullabaloo led them to compare notes and determine the root cause rather quickly. Or maybe they're just over-reacting to defuse the mob but I don't think that's super likely.
  - kimixa 3y ago
    I am only aware of 2 examples, the one that was posted on reddit and is now apparently being shipped to GamersNexus, and Der8auer, who didn't even notice pad discoloration (so may not have even been caused by an overcurrent event). I wouldn't bet their "fast" response is due to them internally already knowing, so much as the PR hit from getting to the top of the PC enthusiast forums on reddit. None of the statements so far even suggest they've reproduced anything wrong, leaving vague statements of investigating it or adding more limitations in case that was an issue. I remember a while ago something similar happened when someone read a lot into a comment into the open source AMD GPU driver as the "Shader Prefetch" feature of their GPUs was broken and disabled. AMD ended up having to issue a statement saying it's enabled and working where it benefits performance - and that shot to the top of those same forums and people "demanded" an explanation, and that was just an internal detail of hardware performance, not even a user-visible feature. To this day some commenters think the performance is somehow hobbled by this, so there may be more pressure to get faster responses. I personally work on GPU drivers, AMD GPU drivers, but not on windows. I actively avoid commenting on things I have personal knowledge of, so I don't accidently leak something, but also because I see so much /wrong/ stuff repeated on the internet. In fact, I would say the majority of the specifics that are "generally accepted" on those subreddits are wrong to the point of being misleading. And a couple of times I've tried to question things I knew were incorrect I was heavily downvoted and dogpiled, so I gave up. So while I have no direct knowledge of anything related to the CPU and it's power management, I'm trying to avoid Gell-Mann amnesia on "facts" repeated in those same subreddits. So my current position is there may be an issue here, it may even be related to the SoC voltage regulation currently being blamed, but the "evidence" so far could also be caused by a thousand other things.
arprocter 3y ago
This is the latest - https://www.tomshardware.com/news/preventing-ryzen-burnout-motherboard-makers-issue-new-firmware https://www.tomshardware.com/news/preventing-ryzen-burnout-m...
- JimBo72 3y ago
  The press releases from the motherboard vendors are 100% proof that these failures are real and a problem. They all cite new firmware that limits SoC voltage, thus showing the analysis in the article is correct.
loeg 3y ago
> Our sources also added further details about the nature of the chip failures — in some cases, excessive SoC voltages destroy the chips' thermal sensors and thermal protection mechanisms, completely disabling its only means of detecting and protecting itself from overheating. As a result, the chip continues to operate without knowing its temperature or tripping the thermal protections. If true, that seems like a pretty major problem!
geerlingguy 3y ago
Just a note: GamersNexus has been digging into this issue quite a bit, and supposedly has a video nearly ready with their initial results [1]. I'd wait until there's more evidence about who's to blame and how large the problem is before putting much weight into the media reports. [1] https://twitter.com/GamersNexus/status/1651308183745331202 https://twitter.com/GamersNexus/status/1651308183745331202
- agloe_dreams 3y ago
  GN seems to think it is Asus's fault, possibly due to bad firmware/BIOS
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - ilyt 3y ago
    There were few reports from non-asus ones IIRC, but it's hard to tell whether that was same "the EXPO profile loaded from memory fried it" or someone just going "MoRe VoLtS BeTtEr" and frying it.
- JimBo72 3y ago
  Four motherboard makers have come forward and issued press releases about new firmware they are releasing that limits the SoC voltage, thus preventing this issue. What further evidence is needed?
  - Szpadel 3y ago
    The question is if they limit abnormal voltage, or just lock to "safe" ones. this might not be a solution, this could be just a workaround basically crippling oc AFAIK none of them said anything about what is happening nor what their fix is doing
  - dotnet00 3y ago
    That can simply be a preemptive measure to prevent a further user meltdown.
djmips 3y ago
I'm not saying this is FUD but I'm getting vibes from the old days.
- frou_dh 3y ago
  Old days like 1st-gen Ryzen in 2017? The launch chips were defective. I confirmed it with my own and had to get a new one. > AMD has not provided an official public explanation of the fundamental problem, but [...] it appears to affect Ryzen CPUs manufactured prior to week 25. https://www.phoronix.com/review/new-ryzen-fixed https://www.phoronix.com/review/new-ryzen-fixed
  - ilyt 3y ago
    This looks like "we didn't told anyone about limits they should not cross" or maybe had too optimistic ones in NDA'd docs they passed to the mobo vendors. Or mobo vendors dropped the balls and thought those were "recommended" and not "absolute max"
  - paulmd 3y ago
    Early Zen2 chips were also basically defective, 3950X and 3900X advertised a very high boost clock that was seemingly impossible to reach in practice. Some chips did, some didn't, and seemingly it came down to silicon lottery whether your chip would miss advertised clocks by as much as 10% like GN's did. There was a series of patches that didn't really resolve anything or change performance in any notable way, and people proclaimed it not actually a problem in the first place, but definitely fixed after this series of patches to fix the not-a-problem. Later batches did seem to have better silicon quality and everyone kinda forgot about it and moved on, because everyone constantly gives AMD hall passes on this kinda stuff, but the people who had bad chips didn't have their issues resolved, and the same boards ran fine with later chips. https://youtu.be/M3sNUFjV7p4?t=255 https://youtu.be/M3sNUFjV7p4?t=255 (he is wrong when he says 4.6 GHz, that's the 3900X, 3950X is advertised at 4.7 GHz) https://youtu.be/JUQ9iUyd0uM https://youtu.be/JUQ9iUyd0uM I mean basically they sold you a 3900 non-X for 3900X prices and everyone searched for reasons to give them a pass: "it says up to 4.7 GHz", "it runs 4.7 GHz if I run a loop of NOPs", etc. And this was very unprecedented at the time, we hadn't normalized the culture of boost being this variable thing, every single Zen1/Zen+ and Intel chip would do the advertised clock rates at least. https://old.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/cfli2n/i_discovered_how_to_get_my_3900x_to_boost_to/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/cfli2n/i_discovered_ho... And the whole thing could have been avoided if they had just advertised a more conservative clock and let the people with good silicon be happily surprised that they were hitting 10% over box speeds. Very anti-consumer then too. As GN themselves said in the first link - this surely would have been a massive scandal if Intel had done it but everyone gives AMD passes constantly. This recently resurfaced a bit with Zen4 again. Silicon quality matters a lot again, der8auer has found that perf/w can vary by as much as 50% (!!!) based on silicon quality. There is a range of performance (~10% let's say) and then bad chips may pull as much as 30% or so more power than a good sample even to get into the bottom of that range, while a great sample will trounce their way to the top of the range while sipping power. Again I would expect this to decline over time as the silicon matures, and there isn't really any direct advertising or promises about perf/w, but... silicon quality is very much in play once again, especially in the lower bins. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGbW7orZS-A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGbW7orZS-A Anyway though the Zen1 segfault bug you mentioned was brushed under the rug too, once again. There was nothing Linux-specific about it, compiling in particular seemed to trigger the bug more easily (this is unsurprising: compiling is very cache-intensive and uop-intensive and often shakes out silicon bugs of all kinds!) and people would have random problems/crashes/etc when compiling under windows too. The processors were simply defective (AMD quietly made changes to the uop cache iirc) but they worked well enough that most people didn't notice. Hey, if you randomly crash out of your game once a week, how are you ever going to tie it back to silicon defects? It's a Linux problem, doesn't affect me. Or those crashy RDNA1 drivers that "worked fine for some people" and after much to-do and a bunch of supposed fixes still never quite worked right for some people... :thinking: (which of course AMD got a pass on the 5700XT too from most people! like, this ryzen 7000 problem is just a bios bug most likely, but they do really ship openly defective products quite often and don't necessarily always fix them fully or make people whole, and they usually get away with it and people defend them while they do it. The criticism is what gets fixes and keeps them honest, they're a company and if they keep getting away with it they'll keep pushing, just like people criticizing NVIDIA for VRAM size or whatever is ultimately what leads to improvements on that in the future. It drives me insane when the AMD crowd just blindly defends and justifies anti-consumer behavior because that makes it harder to get actual improvements!) Anyway, the rest of this is kind of bitter and jaded, but, the AMD fan club has been kinda awful since forever. It's leftover bunker mentality and chip-on-their-shoulder from the Bulldozer days and early Ryzen days, but like, Steve from GN and der8auer and LTT and others have commented on it repeatedly over the years... like the AMD defense force justifying AMD cutting off all legacy chipsets (B550 had not even launched yet and they wanted to kill X470 and B450 support for Zen3, despite B450 being the "current gen" budget boards!) which triggered this video. And they got away with killing off X399 and doing a single-gen TRX40 socket (despite AMD's promises of it being a long-life platform to justify breaking compatibility) and just abandoning HEDT in general, and doing huge price increases during the pandemic (while Intel cut prices). They doubled ASPs of their 6C within a matter of a few months, they cranked the shit out of it and profiteered during a public health crisis while Intel held prices and in fact cut a lot of them too. And sometimes they do make people whole (segfault bug you could send in your chip if you cared), but like, other times they don't, 5700XT never really got fixed, Zen2 launch silicon never got fixed, etc. And then people shrug and move on, and keep defending them as inherently and consistently pro-consumer. Paying studios not to implement (and in some cases rip out existing) DLSS2/3 implementations is another bullshit move lately too. They are betting if they just lean on their console marketshare and stonewall DLSS as much as possible, people will eventually just come to accept a worse outcome, because it's easier for studios to not have to validate two things/etc. Even if the API is open they're not going to accept anything that could be used to plug non-free code, even going as far as pushing for statically compiling FSR2 into everything to prevent DLSS Swapper/DLSS wrapper integration by swapping DLLs around. Anything that could be used to plug something they don't like is bad for them, so it's bad for you. https://youtu.be/8ve5dDQ6TQE?t=974 https://youtu.be/8ve5dDQ6TQE?t=974 Or the Ryzen take-a-way and PREFETCH speculative execution errors... which have vectors which remain essentially unpatched (some were, others weren't) apart from enabling KPTI, which AMD continues to recommend be disabled by default on their architectures. So they're shipping an insecure configuration and "if you care, turn it on". Imagine if Intel did that with Meltdown, shipped an insecure configuration "to win benchmarks"? People would lose their shit. Like business is business, profit-seekers gonna profit-seek, but people defend their anti-consumer behavior constantly and it ends up hurting consumers because it avoids AMD having to face criticism and actually reform their ways. They'll keep doing it as long as they keep getting passes. https://youtu.be/JluNkjdpxFo?t=310 https://youtu.be/JluNkjdpxFo?t=310 https://youtu.be/x03FyPQ3a3E https://youtu.be/x03FyPQ3a3E (and specifically der8auer low-key calls out the same integration between AMD marketing with social media later in the video. Intel and NVIDIA don't have a "red team plus", they don't have a "pathfinder program", by application, for their most stalwart social-media defenders. https://youtu.be/x03FyPQ3a3E?t=356 https://youtu.be/x03FyPQ3a3E?t=356 ) https://youtu.be/rscDxMrZmGU?t=1304 https://youtu.be/rscDxMrZmGU?t=1304 https://wccftech.com/enthusiasts-rejoice-amds-new-threadripper-strx4-socket-is-here-to-stay-long-term-longevity-confirmed/ https://wccftech.com/enthusiasts-rejoice-amds-new-threadripp... AMD really also kinda normalized the idea of marketing around base-TDP... this existed for laptops really was not a thing with desktop processors, 5960X and 7700K etc pretty much stayed within TDP while boosting even in prime95 (which shouldn't be surprising given the clocks/core counts! 5960X is like a 3.3 GHz all-core boost, and 7700K gets 91W to boost 4 cores with an AVX offset as well!), then AMD redefined the term TDP and introduced PPT as their "boost TDP" and then spewed a bunch of crap about how thermal watts are not electrical watts (thanks AMD_Robert!) and thermodynamics do not apply to AMD. Anyway, all they had to say was that PPT was their boost TDP and the chips would run above the official TDP as thermals permitted, but they wanted to stay far away from that "TDP" term to build themselves a 30% cheater factor on all their power measurements. To this day people say things like "I have a nice efficient 65W processor and Intel pulls 100W" when the difference is really more like 90W vs 100W or whatever, it absolutely worked and people continue to buy and mentally follow the marketing number instead of actual power. https://www.anandtech.com/show/10968/the-intel-core-i7-7700k-91w-review-the-new-stock-performance-champion/11 https://www.anandtech.com/show/10968/the-intel-core-i7-7700k... https://www.anandtech.com/show/8426/the-intel-haswell-e-cpu-review-core-i7-5960x-i7-5930k-i7-5820k-tested/4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/8426/the-intel-haswell-e-cpu-... https://old.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/6svy1a/tdp_vs_tdp/dlg8tn8/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/6svy1a/tdp_vs_tdp/dlg8... Not that they're worse than anyone else. Intel and NVIDIA say and do some shit too. But people think AMD's shit don't smell and they've kinda done some anti-consumer crap over the years too and the fan club kinda drives me crazy defending it. It's nuts how much people love AMD and will defend pretty much anything they do. If I sound jaded it's because the last 6+ years have been nonstop Narcissists Prayer from the AMD fan club: "that didn't happen, and if it did it wasn't bad. And if it was, it's not a big deal. And if it is... it's not AMD's fault. And they didn't mean it. And if they did... you deserved it." Even stuff that is pretty clearly AMD like the chipset lockout or brand-locking OEM chips to kill the secondhand market (how does brand-locking prevent swapouts? ok I have to find an asus branded 200GE to swap in when I steal this 5950X, so what?) gets defended with "but partners must have demanded it to sell more motherboards, AMD is just a small family company and can't stand up to the likes ASUS and MSI and Gigabyte!", when the track record pretty clearly supports partners being willing to go much farther on compatibility (like enabling PCIe 4 on some B450 boards that have good enough signal integrity) and AMD being the one putting the foot down to stop them for marketing segmentation. Or the "the reason AMD can't offer good-value GPU products is because you didn't buy them in the past, they're just matching NVIDIA's pricing because they know they can't take marketshare! you deserve it for not instantly giving AMD 80% marketshare that one time they were ahead for 6 months!", etc. High prices aren't caused by AMD being an amoral profit-seeking entity like every other corporation... it's your fault because the 4850 didn't give them overnight market dominance, they want to do great prices but know that gamers won't buy it! AMD literally can do no wrong that social media won't minimize, deflect, or shift blame to someone else. It is straight-up Narcissist's Prayer shit constantly. Drives me nuts. It's fine to like AMD, or even think they've been a net positive for the market (they have!) but like, you know that I need to throw in some praise at the end because the fans are unhinged, and that's the whole problem, you can't even complain about outright instances of anti-consumer behavior without polishing AMD's knob afterwards, or someone throws a hissy because I besmirched AMD's e-honor. And that's crazy, nobody would ever do that for most other tech companies - imagine if criticism of GPP had to be accompanied by similar "kissing the ring" with platitudes of how much NVIDIA had done for advancing graphics tech over the decades, or criticism of Smeltdown had to be accompanied by buttering up Intel. Social media's relationship with AMD is incredibly unhealthy. And people like GN Steve and der8auer have called it out as such too, and it just keeps rolling on. If Intel did something like brand-locking chips there would be nobody defending it, or saying that OEMs want it, or that it's a security feature (again, how does requiring me to find a Lenovo branded chip prevent swapouts?). Daisychained chipsets, on boards that clearly don't justify it? Some of which literally have a single M.2 slot on the whole second chipset, that could have just been connected directly to the first chipset? Sounds like AMD wants to sell more chipsets. Locking out legacy chipsets for bullshit technical reasons then quietly retracting the whole deal later? Yeah, probably sounds like they wanted to sell more chipsets. But like, you have to meticulously eliminate any possible defense or beneficial motive, how dare you impute a profit motive to any of AMD's actions. Again, just drives me nuts. If it were Intel we’d just call a spade a spade and say brand-locking is pretty obviously being pushed with killing the secondhand market as a strong secondary motive if nothing else. In fact people said exactly that when intel locked xeons out on the consumer chipsets (after Broadwell). No defense or knob-slobbing required - they did it for the money. https://www.techpowerup.com/304735/asus-rog-strix-x670e-i-chipset-sits-on-a-m-2-pcb#g304735-1 https://www.techpowerup.com/304735/asus-rog-strix-x670e-i-ch... https://dlcdnets.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/Socket%20AM5/ROG_STRIX_X670E-I_GAMING_WIFI/E20630_ROG_STRIX_X670E-I_GAMING_WIFI_UM_V2_WEB.pdf?model=ROG%20STRIX%20X670E-I%20GAMING%20WIFI#page=16 https://dlcdnets.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/Socket%20AM5/ROG_STRIX... Again none of this is really about the Ryzen 7000 bug. I'm sure it will be patched. People with dead CPUs will get them warrantied. This isn't a showstopper. It's just a general trend in the way these crises get handled for AMD vs everyone else, the Narcissist's Prayer routine gets old.
oblak 3y ago
Spending a month desperately trying to kill a CPU that is known to be extremely sensitive to over-volting finally nets a result. Congrats to the Intel shill Der8auer. I am glad there are armies of tinkerers but this guy knows damn well these CPUs should not be overclocked. He was trying to kill it
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  Why shouldn’t they be over locked? The chip makers have made it easier by the year to the point where AMD releases multiple windows programs to their users that provide newbie friendly overclocking. Adrenalin and Ryzen Master. Not to mention that basically ALL 3rd party GPUs are factory overclocked
  - beebeepka 3y ago
    Context is 3D cache CPUs and they shouldn't be overlocked. 5800x3d cannot be clocked because options in BIOS/UEFI are disabled. Ought to be the same with AM5 but this guy found a way to do it. As expected, the CPU died which, as luck would have it is exactly what AMD said would happen
  - hawski 3y ago
    In this context the name "Adrenalin" seems to fit.
markhahn 3y ago
overclocking is like a carnival geek saying he loves the taste of lightbulbs.
shmerl 3y ago
> ASUS has also issued a statement, clarifying that it will issue firmwares that limit SoC voltage to 1.3V What about RAM that requires 1.4V?
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  RAM voltage won't be affected by SoC voltage.
  - shmerl 3y ago
    So for example when this one mentions: https://www.gskill.com/specification/165/393/1665020366/F5-6000J3040G32GX2-TZ5N-Specification https://www.gskill.com/specification/165/393/1665020366/F5-6... > Tested Voltage (XMP/EXPO) 1.40V Does it mean RAM voltage or SoC voltage? I.e. is it a concern here or not?
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      That's RAM voltage. Well, one of them.
nitinreddy88 3y ago
AMD statement: https://www.anandtech.com/show/18828/amd-issues-official-statement-on-reported-ryzen-7000-burnout-issues https://www.anandtech.com/show/18828/amd-issues-official-sta...
Aardwolf 3y ago
The ASUS BIOS patch update description says: "SoC voltage for Ryzen 7000X3D series limited to a maximum of 1.30V to protect the CPU and motherboard." Does that mean it only applies the fix to the 3D, and with the non-3D 7000 series you're still at risk when using EXPO?

159 points by nitinreddy88 3y ago

So this is my latest question: the new BIOS limits SOC voltate at 1.3V, but the whole point of this "DDR5-6000 sweet spot" claim is the ability to run at 1:1 with the memory controller/memory frequency, i.e. 3000 mHz (from DDR5-6000 Mt/s) to 3000mHz UCLK memory control. Infinity fabric, it appears, runs at its own frequency, 2000-ish mHz or something like that and is not tied to above. So: with the BIOS limit to 1.3V SOC, will the max memory controller frequency be less than 3000 mHz? Is the new sweet spot then something like DDR5-5600?

Aleklart 3y ago

What di you expect? It is a hot product.

givemeethekeys 3y ago

> According to our sources and seconded by an ASUS statement to Der8auer, the problem stems from SoC voltages being altered to unsafe higher levels. This can be imposed from either the pre-programmed voltages used to support 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). Does that mean, as long as I don't overclock, my Ryzen7 CPU will most likely be a-ok?

metadat 3y ago
"Probably", but not guaranteed. This isn't a normal thing to have happen, even with overclocked chips. The temperature sensors used for thermal protection aren't usually the first thing to break.
- ilyt 3y ago
  It might not be temperature sensor itself but circuitry measuring it. Yeah sensor is "just a diode" but that needs amplifier and ADC to get to the rest of the system
caycep 3y ago
What I'm not sure of is DDR5 - it had seemed DDR5 offered more flexibility in voltage/speeds, i.e. the "stock" ddr5 speeds at 1.2V seemed conservative compared to 1.35 or 1.5V for DDR3 or DDR4. But if going about 1.2V or whatever voltage DDR5-6000 EXPO profiles are setting, also necessitates increasing SOC/CPU voltage...maybe it's better to hang back and just stick w/ DDR5-5200 or 5400 or something like that.
kimixa 3y ago
I think this is a bit of a stretch from tomshardware, as if you actually read the statement https://i.imgur.com/pM358j6.jpg https://i.imgur.com/pM358j6.jpg it doesn't actually say what the problem is, or even that there is a problem. Just they released a new BIOS that has more limitations. And the other "evidence" of a photo of a damaged pin pad on a ryzen processor shows the damaged pins aren't related to the SoC rail mentioned in the article.
- JimBo72 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - kimixa 3y ago
    The only thing I can see in the article that supports that is: "Our sources also added further details about the nature of the chip failures — in some cases, excessive SoC voltages destroy the chips' thermal sensors and thermal protection mechanisms, completely disabling its only means of detecting and protecting itself from overheating" And "Our Sources" aren't motherboard vendor statements, none of the statements from motherboard vendors or AMD themselves support this theory, so we're relying on Tom's unnamed "sources" rather than any public evidence or statement. This is exactly what I dislike - the slow removal of the source and quality of evidence and information. It's Toms being bad too, as their statement "seconded by an ASUS statement to Der8auer, the problem stems from SoC voltages" does not seem a good representation of the actual statement - the image of which I linked.
    - JimBo72 3y ago
      ASUS pointing out that they are defining new rules for vCore and SoC voltage to address these issues is in fact pointing to that as the issue. They aren't just "throwing that in there" because it is unrelated. If you need it to be even more direct, here is the statement from ASUS that says it is SoC voltage. https://twitter.com/ASUSTechMKTJJ/status/1650920434404331520 https://twitter.com/ASUSTechMKTJJ/status/1650920434404331520 Here is the statement from Biostar that says SoC voltages are being limited: https://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en/news/news.php?S_ID=559 https://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en/news/news.php?S_ID=559 You've admitted that you work for AMD, which would make a casual observer think that you are being biased in your comments. There is verifiable proof of the correlation with SoC voltage from the ODMs themselves.
pixl97 3y ago
I guess that depends on the nature of the failure and the fragility of the part. If you're staying inside the recommended voltage its likely the product will have a long life. For example look at the life curve of capacitors (and I'm not talking the diseased ones we had to deal with in the 2000s). The 'hotter' we run them the shorter their lifespan is. Now what can be difficult to figure out via testing is to figure out the MTBF when you have a hard cutoff point for failure that's not very much higher than standard operating specs. We could be failing at 100 hours at 1.4v, and 10,000 hours at 1.3v. Or it could last 100,000 hours at 1.3v.
kaelinl 3y ago
My reading of the statement (and understanding of other reporting on this subject) is that EXPO alone can trigger this issue. Calling EXPO overclocking feels somewhat disingenuous to me. EXPO is akin to Intel's XMP. The RAM stick reports timings and other settings that it can handle and then the motherboard/user selects one to use. The profiles are needed because the official JEDEC standard for DDR doesn't provide a mechanism for running up to the frequencies that modern RAM uses; e.g. if you buy a DDR5 6000MHz kit, it'll only run at 4800MHz or thereabouts until you enable EXPO/XMP. RAM is really never expected to be run at the base frequency (without EXPO/XMP). If you buy a prebuilt, it'll have EXPO/XMP enabled, and if you build yourself you always should be enabling it. If you have a RAM kit that's somewhat recent and don't have it enabled, you've likely wasted money on the RAM. Intel has attempted to claim that XMP was overclocking and violated their warranty but my understanding is that they quickly backed off.
- TacticalCoder 3y ago
  > My reading of the statement (and understanding of other reporting on this subject) is that EXPO alone can trigger this issue. Calling EXPO overclocking feels somewhat disingenuous to me. Totally. With DDR5-6000, it's even nastier: AMD repeatedly said that DDR5-6000 was the "sweet spot". I never overclocked any computer of mine but I did buy DDR5-6000 for my 7700X because AMD said it was the sweet spot. And I turned EXPO on so that it'd run at 6000, not 4800. And now, after saying 6000 was the "sweet spot", they try to word things as if EXPO was somehow overclocking!?
  - Ciantic 3y ago
    I'm in same boat. I payed a premium for DDR5-6000 64GB for my 7950X, because AMD said it's the sweet spot... I didn't ever consider this "overclocking", I haven't ever been interested on overclocking, I just want stable machine. Now I'm considering disabling EXPO, but I don't think it would work as 6000 anymore after that. I have used this machine for 4 months now, so I'd say it's pretty safe, but who knows, I haven't taxed the CPU with gaming yet.
    - 3y ago
zamalek 3y ago
In general, you should be running the EXPO profile: this "upclocks" your RAM. I use the term "upclock" instead of overclock because you aren't pushing your RAM past its manufacturer's limit, you are pushing it to that limit. The JEDEC profile (the opposite of EXPO) is extremely conservative and can significantly affect performance. This effect is compounded with Ryzen because of Infinity Fabric, which is the interconnect between the chiplets in the CPU. IF is clocked to the same speed as your RAM - so at the 6000MT/s "sweet spot" the article mentions your IF and RAM bus are running at 3000MHz. Matching IF to RAM bus is so important that increasing the RAM bus clock above the IF clock will decrease performance (unless the RAM bus clock is a multiple of the IF clock). I haven't done the comparison on my 7950x, but on my 3950x running the IF at 1800MHz (RAM at 3600MT/s) resulted in a 10%-30% uplift in performance (depending on the workload). So with Ryzen, if should consider purchasing RAM that is matched to the IF clock. For Ryzen 7 that is 6000MT/s. If you purchased RAM above that, you should definitely decrease the clock to match IF (you can tighten RAM timing to take advantage of the more expensive chips that you purchased, if you have the patience to). What am I doing? I am going to disable EXPO, but I will definitely be re-enabling once this has been resolved. Aside: What is MT/s vs MHz? DDR stands for "double data rate", meaning the MHz that everyone uses to describe the speed of RAM is a misnomer. "6000MHz" RAM actually runs at 3000MHz (but does two transfers per clock cycle). So: Mega-Transfers per Second.
- ilyt 3y ago
  >In general, you should be running the EXPO profile: this "upclocks" your RAM. I use the term "upclock" instead of overclock because you aren't pushing your RAM past its manufacturer's limit, you are pushing it to that limit. The JEDEC profile (the opposite of EXPO) is extremely conservative and can significantly affect performance. Any source I could find says that EXPO does void warranty, as it is overclocking. https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/expo https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/expo (in footnotes section at the end of page) It might move RAM to it's manufacturer spec as you said but it does it by overclocking CPU > So with Ryzen, if should consider purchasing RAM that is matched to the IF clock. For Ryzen 7 that is 6000MT/s. If you purchased RAM above that, you should definitely decrease the clock to match IF (you can tighten RAM timing to take advantage of the more expensive chips that you purchased, if you have the patience to). Do you know any good benchmark (preferably Linux one) that would show those differences? I will be getting 7800X3D in few days so I want to test it for a bit. > What am I doing? I am going to disable EXPO, but I will definitely be re-enabling once this has been resolved. The core of the issue seems to be "just" overvolting so I'm guessing any manual overclock would still be fine. I have no need for it now (just puny 1070 to pair it with for now), but yeah, wait for new BIOS firmware seems to be best option. > Aside: What is MT/s vs MHz? DDR stands for "double data rate", meaning the MHz that everyone uses to describe the speed of RAM is a misnomer. "6000MHz" RAM actually runs at 3000MHz (but does two transfers per clock cycle). So: Mega-Transfers per Second. Not exactly. The specified speed is only speed of the bus between memory and CPU, not the speed of memory chip itself. DDR4 3200 and DDR5 6400 have exact same internal speed (400MHz) and this is why there isn't much of latency improvement between generations (DDR5 does have some other tricks for latency). Also the 6400MHz is actual speed data is put on the bus, even if clock is half of that. It's pretty much entirely so the RAM chips don't have some insane number of pins but something manageable.
teirce 3y ago
Vendors are putting out updated BIOS that limit voltage going to the chips. Based on internet hearsay, even some of the non-OC chips were getting wrecked by stock BIOS overvolting enough. The real concern is with the X3D chips which are particularly sensitive to voltage and not particularly meant to be overclocked. I think you're fine as long as you flash an updated BIOS put out by your MB manufacturer.
a3w 3y ago
Derachtauer is a strange name. Is that guy called Kevin Achtauer,or what?
- zen_1 3y ago
  It's a stand in for "Der Bauer", and I think the guy's name is Roman
- anticensor 3y ago
  His real name is Roman Hartung.
paulmd 3y ago
If you enable Expo/XMP then AMD considers that an overclock (GD-106/GD-112). https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/gamingdetails https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/gamingdetails That’s the root of the problem seemingly - going past the official spec (5200 MT/s for 2 sticks, 3600 MT/s for 4 sticks) requires additional voltage to the memory controller and it’s not uncommon for motherboards to automatically punch up the voltages when you turn on XMP or Expo. You requested the board to overclock after all, they’re just helping you get it stable without tinkering! It’s completely legal from the mobo vendor’s perspective to enable more voltage in “auto-OC” scenarios and they are in fact incentivized to do so by the possibility of returns and negative reviews/bad word of mouth. Customers will remember when “it didn’t work on Asus but I just enabled XMP on MSI and it worked fine”, even if that’s because MSI is punching up voltages. They will see that MSI scores 3% better in whatever benchmark. And AMD themselves in fact advertises benchmarks with Expo enabled, despite the fact that it officially voids the warranty. AMD and Intel (both) have gotten away with this for a long time, having their cake on heavily implying/suggesting it be enabled but technically voiding the warranty if you do (although it's quite unenforced unless you openly tell a warranty agent that you did it). I had a 9900K fail due to simply enabling XMP too, and I’ve seen many reports of early Zen1/Zen+/Zen2 with what seems likely to be IMC failures (they are getting to be "of the age" - 3-5 years with increased VSOC and the memory controllers are just clapped out). DDR4 controllers seem more delicate in general compared to DDR3, and DDR5 requires still higher voltages. It’s almost shocking to hear buildzoid recommend 1.3v VSOC as a “safe” daily driver. AM4 voltages were more like 0.8-1.1v. It also doesn’t help that the early AM5 IO die seems to be terrible. AMD's memory controllers always been worse than Intel even on AM4, but a lot of AM5 chips won’t even post with 4 sticks even at the pedestrian official spec of 3600 MT/s (intel is 3600 MT/s too but they actually work mostly reliably at it, it's a lottery with Zen4). Zen5 is supposed to feature an improved IO die and I wonder if the VSOC will be lower there too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P58VqVvDjxo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P58VqVvDjxo
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  I'll leave my little anecdata with Intel Alder Lake memory controller shenanigans since it's relevant. I built an i7 12700K system last year with 4x16GB DIMMs of DDR5-5600 RAM, for a total of 64GB RAM. Not being fully aware of the memory controller's limitations at that point (moral: read the datasheets!) I turned on XMP which obviously overclocked the RAM to 5600MHz. Note that at this point I was curious why the mobo had booted the system with RAM clocked to 4000MHz prior to my fiddling around with the BIOS. Afterwards, I had instability which manifested in random program and system crashes. Eventually I checked the RAM and confirmed that was the issue with memtest86 returning errors. I read up on the CPU's datasheet and learned that when supplied with 2 DIMMs per channel with 1 rank per DIMM, the memory controller downclocks to 4000MHz as specified. Incidentally, this answered why the mobo booted the system up with RAM clocked to 4000MHz at the beginning. I turned off XMP and backed off the overclock to 4800MHz with timings as applied by the mobo (they're just JEDEC profile timings), and that got me back to stability with subsequent tests in memtest86 returning no errors. The important things to takeaway here are that: * DDR5 memory controllers are still in their infancy compared to DDR4 and DDR3 controllers today, and can't yet deal with so much RAM at once. * Going beyond 1 DIMM per channel, 1 rank per DIMM means the memory controller will run slower than advertised, and this is according to specification. It is on us the end-users to do our homework, we can't forget we are using precision electronics. * With the memory controller running slower, overclocks are that much more taxing than XMP/EXPO and the marketing would imply. Simply turning on XMP/EXPO without thought is dangerous because those profiles do not account for a slower memory controller. * Overclocking is by its very definition running hardware above and beyond what they were designed and rated to operate at. Warranties will be voided, and hardware can be damaged or destroyed because they are operated out of specification. You have been warned, ignorance is not an excuse. * Between CPUs (and GPUs) today coming "over"clocked from the factory to perform at their peak and RAM speed having negligible real world performance implications for the vast majority of use cases, end-user overclocking is simply not worth the hassle unless you absolutely know what you're doing. * EFI/BIOS firmware nearly always come out of the box with safe defaults. If you don't know what you're doing, leaving them alone is perfectly fine. You will still have a very performant system. Overclocking is not for the faint of heart (nor the ignorant!).

xxpor 3y ago

>We are aware of a limited number of reports online claiming that excess voltage while overclocking may have damaged the motherboard socket and pin pads. Well, if the overclocking part is true, shrug. Not that it's great, but it's also not completely unexpected for bad things to happen when you OC.

wmf 3y ago
AMD recommends that customers use EXPO then they claim it's warranty-voiding unsafe overclocking.
- derefr 3y ago
  And doctors recommend safe-injection sites, while also claiming that shooting heroin is unsafe. Shocking! It’s called “harm reduction” — i.e. “if you’re going to do stupid thing X anyway, you may as well use our weak guardrails for it, to hopefully minimize the damage you’re causing compared to doing it through some random third-party solution.”
  - Sakos 3y ago
    Oh please. They advertise their performance based on using things like EXPO. It's insanely anti-consumer for them to turn around and say "if you want to reach the performance we sold you this CPU on, you need to turn in this feature that voids your warranty and could potentially blow up your CPU". I don't understand why you're defending them here.
  - formerly_proven 3y ago
    AMD has generally presented benchmarks with market-typical XMP/A-XMP/EXPO memory; their CPUs benefit more than the competition from that. Now some people have the urge to turn around and go “well why you’d do that, what are you, stupid?” for some reason.
Dylan16807 3y ago
"the pre-programmed voltages used to support EXPO memory overclocking profiles" Bad things shouldn't be expected when using pre-programmed voltages. And chips shorting out beyond thermal limits shouldn't be expected ever.

kimixa 3y ago

Ugh, this has exploded on reddit and through a game of telephone seems to have turned a couple of anecdotes, a single photo of a damaged chip, speculation from users and media and a statement saying "We're aware of the reports and are investigating" into a massive issue that is "Confirmed" to affect all processors and spouting advice and recommendations based on it. It's a great example of a hype train and something like citogenesis, each loop through comments and media seems to turn more speculation into fact.

mastax 3y ago
It's not "a single photo of a damaged chip" there are at least 4 different public examples that I've seen. Not that it changes the scale of the evidence much. The fact that the vendors are acting so quickly about this suggests to me that they have other non-public examples of the problem (from warranty returns, etc.) and the hullabaloo led them to compare notes and determine the root cause rather quickly. Or maybe they're just over-reacting to defuse the mob but I don't think that's super likely.
- kimixa 3y ago
  I am only aware of 2 examples, the one that was posted on reddit and is now apparently being shipped to GamersNexus, and Der8auer, who didn't even notice pad discoloration (so may not have even been caused by an overcurrent event). I wouldn't bet their "fast" response is due to them internally already knowing, so much as the PR hit from getting to the top of the PC enthusiast forums on reddit. None of the statements so far even suggest they've reproduced anything wrong, leaving vague statements of investigating it or adding more limitations in case that was an issue. I remember a while ago something similar happened when someone read a lot into a comment into the open source AMD GPU driver as the "Shader Prefetch" feature of their GPUs was broken and disabled. AMD ended up having to issue a statement saying it's enabled and working where it benefits performance - and that shot to the top of those same forums and people "demanded" an explanation, and that was just an internal detail of hardware performance, not even a user-visible feature. To this day some commenters think the performance is somehow hobbled by this, so there may be more pressure to get faster responses. I personally work on GPU drivers, AMD GPU drivers, but not on windows. I actively avoid commenting on things I have personal knowledge of, so I don't accidently leak something, but also because I see so much /wrong/ stuff repeated on the internet. In fact, I would say the majority of the specifics that are "generally accepted" on those subreddits are wrong to the point of being misleading. And a couple of times I've tried to question things I knew were incorrect I was heavily downvoted and dogpiled, so I gave up. So while I have no direct knowledge of anything related to the CPU and it's power management, I'm trying to avoid Gell-Mann amnesia on "facts" repeated in those same subreddits. So my current position is there may be an issue here, it may even be related to the SoC voltage regulation currently being blamed, but the "evidence" so far could also be caused by a thousand other things.

arprocter 3y ago

This is the latest - https://www.tomshardware.com/news/preventing-ryzen-burnout-motherboard-makers-issue-new-firmware https://www.tomshardware.com/news/preventing-ryzen-burnout-m...

JimBo72 3y ago
The press releases from the motherboard vendors are 100% proof that these failures are real and a problem. They all cite new firmware that limits SoC voltage, thus showing the analysis in the article is correct.

loeg 3y ago

> Our sources also added further details about the nature of the chip failures — in some cases, excessive SoC voltages destroy the chips' thermal sensors and thermal protection mechanisms, completely disabling its only means of detecting and protecting itself from overheating. As a result, the chip continues to operate without knowing its temperature or tripping the thermal protections. If true, that seems like a pretty major problem!

geerlingguy 3y ago

Just a note: GamersNexus has been digging into this issue quite a bit, and supposedly has a video nearly ready with their initial results [1]. I'd wait until there's more evidence about who's to blame and how large the problem is before putting much weight into the media reports. [1] https://twitter.com/GamersNexus/status/1651308183745331202 https://twitter.com/GamersNexus/status/1651308183745331202

agloe_dreams 3y ago
GN seems to think it is Asus's fault, possibly due to bad firmware/BIOS
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ilyt 3y ago
  There were few reports from non-asus ones IIRC, but it's hard to tell whether that was same "the EXPO profile loaded from memory fried it" or someone just going "MoRe VoLtS BeTtEr" and frying it.
JimBo72 3y ago
Four motherboard makers have come forward and issued press releases about new firmware they are releasing that limits the SoC voltage, thus preventing this issue. What further evidence is needed?
- Szpadel 3y ago
  The question is if they limit abnormal voltage, or just lock to "safe" ones. this might not be a solution, this could be just a workaround basically crippling oc AFAIK none of them said anything about what is happening nor what their fix is doing
- dotnet00 3y ago
  That can simply be a preemptive measure to prevent a further user meltdown.

djmips 3y ago

I'm not saying this is FUD but I'm getting vibes from the old days.

frou_dh 3y ago
Old days like 1st-gen Ryzen in 2017? The launch chips were defective. I confirmed it with my own and had to get a new one. > AMD has not provided an official public explanation of the fundamental problem, but [...] it appears to affect Ryzen CPUs manufactured prior to week 25. https://www.phoronix.com/review/new-ryzen-fixed https://www.phoronix.com/review/new-ryzen-fixed
- ilyt 3y ago
  This looks like "we didn't told anyone about limits they should not cross" or maybe had too optimistic ones in NDA'd docs they passed to the mobo vendors. Or mobo vendors dropped the balls and thought those were "recommended" and not "absolute max"
- paulmd 3y ago
  Early Zen2 chips were also basically defective, 3950X and 3900X advertised a very high boost clock that was seemingly impossible to reach in practice. Some chips did, some didn't, and seemingly it came down to silicon lottery whether your chip would miss advertised clocks by as much as 10% like GN's did. There was a series of patches that didn't really resolve anything or change performance in any notable way, and people proclaimed it not actually a problem in the first place, but definitely fixed after this series of patches to fix the not-a-problem. Later batches did seem to have better silicon quality and everyone kinda forgot about it and moved on, because everyone constantly gives AMD hall passes on this kinda stuff, but the people who had bad chips didn't have their issues resolved, and the same boards ran fine with later chips. https://youtu.be/M3sNUFjV7p4?t=255 https://youtu.be/M3sNUFjV7p4?t=255 (he is wrong when he says 4.6 GHz, that's the 3900X, 3950X is advertised at 4.7 GHz) https://youtu.be/JUQ9iUyd0uM https://youtu.be/JUQ9iUyd0uM I mean basically they sold you a 3900 non-X for 3900X prices and everyone searched for reasons to give them a pass: "it says up to 4.7 GHz", "it runs 4.7 GHz if I run a loop of NOPs", etc. And this was very unprecedented at the time, we hadn't normalized the culture of boost being this variable thing, every single Zen1/Zen+ and Intel chip would do the advertised clock rates at least. https://old.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/cfli2n/i_discovered_how_to_get_my_3900x_to_boost_to/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/cfli2n/i_discovered_ho... And the whole thing could have been avoided if they had just advertised a more conservative clock and let the people with good silicon be happily surprised that they were hitting 10% over box speeds. Very anti-consumer then too. As GN themselves said in the first link - this surely would have been a massive scandal if Intel had done it but everyone gives AMD passes constantly. This recently resurfaced a bit with Zen4 again. Silicon quality matters a lot again, der8auer has found that perf/w can vary by as much as 50% (!!!) based on silicon quality. There is a range of performance (~10% let's say) and then bad chips may pull as much as 30% or so more power than a good sample even to get into the bottom of that range, while a great sample will trounce their way to the top of the range while sipping power. Again I would expect this to decline over time as the silicon matures, and there isn't really any direct advertising or promises about perf/w, but... silicon quality is very much in play once again, especially in the lower bins. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGbW7orZS-A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGbW7orZS-A Anyway though the Zen1 segfault bug you mentioned was brushed under the rug too, once again. There was nothing Linux-specific about it, compiling in particular seemed to trigger the bug more easily (this is unsurprising: compiling is very cache-intensive and uop-intensive and often shakes out silicon bugs of all kinds!) and people would have random problems/crashes/etc when compiling under windows too. The processors were simply defective (AMD quietly made changes to the uop cache iirc) but they worked well enough that most people didn't notice. Hey, if you randomly crash out of your game once a week, how are you ever going to tie it back to silicon defects? It's a Linux problem, doesn't affect me. Or those crashy RDNA1 drivers that "worked fine for some people" and after much to-do and a bunch of supposed fixes still never quite worked right for some people... :thinking: (which of course AMD got a pass on the 5700XT too from most people! like, this ryzen 7000 problem is just a bios bug most likely, but they do really ship openly defective products quite often and don't necessarily always fix them fully or make people whole, and they usually get away with it and people defend them while they do it. The criticism is what gets fixes and keeps them honest, they're a company and if they keep getting away with it they'll keep pushing, just like people criticizing NVIDIA for VRAM size or whatever is ultimately what leads to improvements on that in the future. It drives me insane when the AMD crowd just blindly defends and justifies anti-consumer behavior because that makes it harder to get actual improvements!) Anyway, the rest of this is kind of bitter and jaded, but, the AMD fan club has been kinda awful since forever. It's leftover bunker mentality and chip-on-their-shoulder from the Bulldozer days and early Ryzen days, but like, Steve from GN and der8auer and LTT and others have commented on it repeatedly over the years... like the AMD defense force justifying AMD cutting off all legacy chipsets (B550 had not even launched yet and they wanted to kill X470 and B450 support for Zen3, despite B450 being the "current gen" budget boards!) which triggered this video. And they got away with killing off X399 and doing a single-gen TRX40 socket (despite AMD's promises of it being a long-life platform to justify breaking compatibility) and just abandoning HEDT in general, and doing huge price increases during the pandemic (while Intel cut prices). They doubled ASPs of their 6C within a matter of a few months, they cranked the shit out of it and profiteered during a public health crisis while Intel held prices and in fact cut a lot of them too. And sometimes they do make people whole (segfault bug you could send in your chip if you cared), but like, other times they don't, 5700XT never really got fixed, Zen2 launch silicon never got fixed, etc. And then people shrug and move on, and keep defending them as inherently and consistently pro-consumer. Paying studios not to implement (and in some cases rip out existing) DLSS2/3 implementations is another bullshit move lately too. They are betting if they just lean on their console marketshare and stonewall DLSS as much as possible, people will eventually just come to accept a worse outcome, because it's easier for studios to not have to validate two things/etc. Even if the API is open they're not going to accept anything that could be used to plug non-free code, even going as far as pushing for statically compiling FSR2 into everything to prevent DLSS Swapper/DLSS wrapper integration by swapping DLLs around. Anything that could be used to plug something they don't like is bad for them, so it's bad for you. https://youtu.be/8ve5dDQ6TQE?t=974 https://youtu.be/8ve5dDQ6TQE?t=974 Or the Ryzen take-a-way and PREFETCH speculative execution errors... which have vectors which remain essentially unpatched (some were, others weren't) apart from enabling KPTI, which AMD continues to recommend be disabled by default on their architectures. So they're shipping an insecure configuration and "if you care, turn it on". Imagine if Intel did that with Meltdown, shipped an insecure configuration "to win benchmarks"? People would lose their shit. Like business is business, profit-seekers gonna profit-seek, but people defend their anti-consumer behavior constantly and it ends up hurting consumers because it avoids AMD having to face criticism and actually reform their ways. They'll keep doing it as long as they keep getting passes. https://youtu.be/JluNkjdpxFo?t=310 https://youtu.be/JluNkjdpxFo?t=310 https://youtu.be/x03FyPQ3a3E https://youtu.be/x03FyPQ3a3E (and specifically der8auer low-key calls out the same integration between AMD marketing with social media later in the video. Intel and NVIDIA don't have a "red team plus", they don't have a "pathfinder program", by application, for their most stalwart social-media defenders. https://youtu.be/x03FyPQ3a3E?t=356 https://youtu.be/x03FyPQ3a3E?t=356 ) https://youtu.be/rscDxMrZmGU?t=1304 https://youtu.be/rscDxMrZmGU?t=1304 https://wccftech.com/enthusiasts-rejoice-amds-new-threadripper-strx4-socket-is-here-to-stay-long-term-longevity-confirmed/ https://wccftech.com/enthusiasts-rejoice-amds-new-threadripp... AMD really also kinda normalized the idea of marketing around base-TDP... this existed for laptops really was not a thing with desktop processors, 5960X and 7700K etc pretty much stayed within TDP while boosting even in prime95 (which shouldn't be surprising given the clocks/core counts! 5960X is like a 3.3 GHz all-core boost, and 7700K gets 91W to boost 4 cores with an AVX offset as well!), then AMD redefined the term TDP and introduced PPT as their "boost TDP" and then spewed a bunch of crap about how thermal watts are not electrical watts (thanks AMD_Robert!) and thermodynamics do not apply to AMD. Anyway, all they had to say was that PPT was their boost TDP and the chips would run above the official TDP as thermals permitted, but they wanted to stay far away from that "TDP" term to build themselves a 30% cheater factor on all their power measurements. To this day people say things like "I have a nice efficient 65W processor and Intel pulls 100W" when the difference is really more like 90W vs 100W or whatever, it absolutely worked and people continue to buy and mentally follow the marketing number instead of actual power. https://www.anandtech.com/show/10968/the-intel-core-i7-7700k-91w-review-the-new-stock-performance-champion/11 https://www.anandtech.com/show/10968/the-intel-core-i7-7700k... https://www.anandtech.com/show/8426/the-intel-haswell-e-cpu-review-core-i7-5960x-i7-5930k-i7-5820k-tested/4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/8426/the-intel-haswell-e-cpu-... https://old.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/6svy1a/tdp_vs_tdp/dlg8tn8/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/6svy1a/tdp_vs_tdp/dlg8... Not that they're worse than anyone else. Intel and NVIDIA say and do some shit too. But people think AMD's shit don't smell and they've kinda done some anti-consumer crap over the years too and the fan club kinda drives me crazy defending it. It's nuts how much people love AMD and will defend pretty much anything they do. If I sound jaded it's because the last 6+ years have been nonstop Narcissists Prayer from the AMD fan club: "that didn't happen, and if it did it wasn't bad. And if it was, it's not a big deal. And if it is... it's not AMD's fault. And they didn't mean it. And if they did... you deserved it." Even stuff that is pretty clearly AMD like the chipset lockout or brand-locking OEM chips to kill the secondhand market (how does brand-locking prevent swapouts? ok I have to find an asus branded 200GE to swap in when I steal this 5950X, so what?) gets defended with "but partners must have demanded it to sell more motherboards, AMD is just a small family company and can't stand up to the likes ASUS and MSI and Gigabyte!", when the track record pretty clearly supports partners being willing to go much farther on compatibility (like enabling PCIe 4 on some B450 boards that have good enough signal integrity) and AMD being the one putting the foot down to stop them for marketing segmentation. Or the "the reason AMD can't offer good-value GPU products is because you didn't buy them in the past, they're just matching NVIDIA's pricing because they know they can't take marketshare! you deserve it for not instantly giving AMD 80% marketshare that one time they were ahead for 6 months!", etc. High prices aren't caused by AMD being an amoral profit-seeking entity like every other corporation... it's your fault because the 4850 didn't give them overnight market dominance, they want to do great prices but know that gamers won't buy it! AMD literally can do no wrong that social media won't minimize, deflect, or shift blame to someone else. It is straight-up Narcissist's Prayer shit constantly. Drives me nuts. It's fine to like AMD, or even think they've been a net positive for the market (they have!) but like, you know that I need to throw in some praise at the end because the fans are unhinged, and that's the whole problem, you can't even complain about outright instances of anti-consumer behavior without polishing AMD's knob afterwards, or someone throws a hissy because I besmirched AMD's e-honor. And that's crazy, nobody would ever do that for most other tech companies - imagine if criticism of GPP had to be accompanied by similar "kissing the ring" with platitudes of how much NVIDIA had done for advancing graphics tech over the decades, or criticism of Smeltdown had to be accompanied by buttering up Intel. Social media's relationship with AMD is incredibly unhealthy. And people like GN Steve and der8auer have called it out as such too, and it just keeps rolling on. If Intel did something like brand-locking chips there would be nobody defending it, or saying that OEMs want it, or that it's a security feature (again, how does requiring me to find a Lenovo branded chip prevent swapouts?). Daisychained chipsets, on boards that clearly don't justify it? Some of which literally have a single M.2 slot on the whole second chipset, that could have just been connected directly to the first chipset? Sounds like AMD wants to sell more chipsets. Locking out legacy chipsets for bullshit technical reasons then quietly retracting the whole deal later? Yeah, probably sounds like they wanted to sell more chipsets. But like, you have to meticulously eliminate any possible defense or beneficial motive, how dare you impute a profit motive to any of AMD's actions. Again, just drives me nuts. If it were Intel we’d just call a spade a spade and say brand-locking is pretty obviously being pushed with killing the secondhand market as a strong secondary motive if nothing else. In fact people said exactly that when intel locked xeons out on the consumer chipsets (after Broadwell). No defense or knob-slobbing required - they did it for the money. https://www.techpowerup.com/304735/asus-rog-strix-x670e-i-chipset-sits-on-a-m-2-pcb#g304735-1 https://www.techpowerup.com/304735/asus-rog-strix-x670e-i-ch... https://dlcdnets.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/Socket%20AM5/ROG_STRIX_X670E-I_GAMING_WIFI/E20630_ROG_STRIX_X670E-I_GAMING_WIFI_UM_V2_WEB.pdf?model=ROG%20STRIX%20X670E-I%20GAMING%20WIFI#page=16 https://dlcdnets.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/Socket%20AM5/ROG_STRIX... Again none of this is really about the Ryzen 7000 bug. I'm sure it will be patched. People with dead CPUs will get them warrantied. This isn't a showstopper. It's just a general trend in the way these crises get handled for AMD vs everyone else, the Narcissist's Prayer routine gets old.

oblak 3y ago

Spending a month desperately trying to kill a CPU that is known to be extremely sensitive to over-volting finally nets a result. Congrats to the Intel shill Der8auer. I am glad there are armies of tinkerers but this guy knows damn well these CPUs should not be overclocked. He was trying to kill it

coffeebeqn 3y ago
Why shouldn’t they be over locked? The chip makers have made it easier by the year to the point where AMD releases multiple windows programs to their users that provide newbie friendly overclocking. Adrenalin and Ryzen Master. Not to mention that basically ALL 3rd party GPUs are factory overclocked
- beebeepka 3y ago
  Context is 3D cache CPUs and they shouldn't be overlocked. 5800x3d cannot be clocked because options in BIOS/UEFI are disabled. Ought to be the same with AM5 but this guy found a way to do it. As expected, the CPU died which, as luck would have it is exactly what AMD said would happen
- hawski 3y ago
  In this context the name "Adrenalin" seems to fit.

markhahn 3y ago

overclocking is like a carnival geek saying he loves the taste of lightbulbs.

shmerl 3y ago

> ASUS has also issued a statement, clarifying that it will issue firmwares that limit SoC voltage to 1.3V What about RAM that requires 1.4V?

Dylan16807 3y ago
RAM voltage won't be affected by SoC voltage.
- shmerl 3y ago
  So for example when this one mentions: https://www.gskill.com/specification/165/393/1665020366/F5-6000J3040G32GX2-TZ5N-Specification https://www.gskill.com/specification/165/393/1665020366/F5-6... > Tested Voltage (XMP/EXPO) 1.40V Does it mean RAM voltage or SoC voltage? I.e. is it a concern here or not?
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    That's RAM voltage. Well, one of them.

nitinreddy88 3y ago

AMD statement: https://www.anandtech.com/show/18828/amd-issues-official-statement-on-reported-ryzen-7000-burnout-issues https://www.anandtech.com/show/18828/amd-issues-official-sta...

Aardwolf 3y ago

The ASUS BIOS patch update description says: "SoC voltage for Ryzen 7000X3D series limited to a maximum of 1.30V to protect the CPU and motherboard." Does that mean it only applies the fix to the 3D, and with the non-3D 7000 series you're still at risk when using EXPO?