Recently, a Reddit user known as Ultracheese3 shared a troubling incident: their Ryzen 7 7800X3D processor suffered catastrophic damage while installed on an ASRock X870 Riptide motherboard. The CPU was not only burned but also visibly warped, and the motherboard socket showed signs of discoloration, turning yellow. The user had been operating the system with BIOS version 3.06, which was released in August of the previous year. This particular BIOS version lacked the latest patches designed to bolster CPU stability. At present, the most recent BIOS version available for the ASRock X870 Riptide motherboard is 3.50. Both AMD and ASRock strongly advise users to upgrade to this latest BIOS iteration in order to minimize the risk of similar issues.

Previously, the AMD Ryzen 9000 series processors were also plagued by a high incidence of failures. There were 108 reported failure cases involving the 9800X3D model. Strikingly, 82% of these failures occurred on ASRock motherboards, a proportion significantly higher than that seen with motherboards from other brands. Initially, ASRock dismissed these allegations. However, they later rolled out a new BIOS version aimed at resolving boot and memory compatibility problems. In doing so, they acknowledged that the preset Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) parameters on their AM5 motherboards were excessively aggressive. This aggressive setting was suspected to be the primary cause behind the widespread failures. Fortunately, ASRock has now rectified this issue through a subsequent BIOS update.