In brief: Some AMD Ryzen 7000X3D CPU owners have reported problems with the chips overheating and burning up their new motherboards. While it's not yet been confirmed, the issue is suspected to be related to the mobo BIOS.

We're big fans of the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, praising the 3D V-Cache CPU for its speed and power efficiency. But not everyone is enjoying AMD's recent release. A Redditor called Speedrookie posted that they came home to their system idling with the fans running at full and a QCode of 00 on the debug LED of their Asus ROG Strix X670-E motherboard.

Speedrookie decided to take the system apart to investigate. They discovered that the 7800X3D CPU pad was bulging. "I imagine there was just too much heat on the contacts causing the pad to expand. Not that the CPU has an internal component which exploded," they wrote.

Speedrookie added that the CPU was not overclocked, but the memory was, via the EPXO 1 profile. Nothing strenuous was running when the system was left idling, and the pins on the LGA were recessed and slightly charred. One likely important fact is that they attempted to update the BIOS to 1101 from 0922 during installation, but due to issues with EXPO profiles being unstable and not POSTing, they returned to 0922.

This wasn't an isolated incident. User Zephonix 3 compiled all the reports of AM5 motherboard and X3D chip combos burning up. While MSI boards were also affected, almost all are related to Asus X670 mobos.

Speedrookie has since updated his post, writing that AMD provided a pre-paid shipping label for the RMA while Asus offered replacements. However, these had already been sold to Steve from YouTube channel Gamers Nexus, who wanted to buy them for analysis.

Asus did say that the motherboard technically isn't warranted with AMD due to the use of EXPO.

"I have always thought of EXPO/XMP as "verified/approved" settings for memory, and not so much an overclock. Especially since the QVL reflects that. This is not the case, and in fact the rated settings also vary by CPU, so just because the QVL says 6000/30-38-38-96, does not mean that it should work across CPUs," wrote Speedrookie.

"With this in mind, as I state above, I purposely went back to a BIOS version which POSTed with EXPO which was not an approved version for X3D series CPUs and chalked this up to BIOS instability rather than a potential intention by the BIOS engineers. So for people on a similar build, I'd say just make sure to update your BIOS and forgo EXPO for the time being until we know things are stable and working as intended. The cause here is still speculative, however may be a good safety measure to take."

The BIOS does seem to be the culprit here, especially as HXL (via Tom's Hardware) tweeted that Asus just withdrew old BIOSes for several of its AMD X670-based motherboards, but some of the old BIOSes remain available for the boards.

ASUS withdrew the old BIOS from many motherboardsð² pic.twitter.com/oaHoTR0YF8

– HXL (@9550pro) April 22, 2023

It's noted that famed overclocked der8auer had an issue with an AMD Ryzen 7000X3D chip a few weeks ago, though he did raise the core voltage to a high level. There's also a report of Russian YouTube channel VIK-off, which usually repairs GPUs, having two motherboards from Asus and Ryzen 7000X3D AM5 CPUs in for repair that burned in the exact same spot (below), with more similarly damaged hardware on the way.

Expect to learn more about the issue soon - Gamers Nexus' investigation is likely to reveal all. In the meantime, anyone using an AMD Ryzen 7000X3D chip should probably make sure their BIOS is up to date.