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This has been a tense week for owners of AMD 7000-series CPUs. Over the past few days, it’s become apparent that enabling EXPO memory overclocking might lead to an untimely chip death due to excess voltage being pumped to the CPU. Initially, AMD said it was investigating this phenomenon, but it had no definitive answers. Now the company has released a follow-up statement with a solution: It will limit CPU/SoC voltage to 1.3V via its AGESA code, the foundation motherboard manufacturers use to make a PC BIOS.
Here’s AMD’s statement in full via Tom’s Hardware:
We have root caused the issue and have already distributed a new AGESA that puts measures in place on specific power rails on AM5 motherboards to prevent the CPU from operating beyond its specification limits, including a cap on SOC voltage at 1.3V. None of these changes affect the ability of our Ryzen 7000 Series processors to overclock memory using EXPO or XMP kits or boost performance using PBO technology.
We expect all of our ODM partners to release new BIOS for their AM5 boards over the next few days. We recommend all users to check their motherboard manufacturers’ websites and update their BIOS to ensure their system has the most up-to-date software for their processor.
Anyone whose CPU may have been impacted by this issue should contact AMD customer support. Our customer service team is aware of the situation and prioritizing these cases.
One of the affected CPUs has not only burn marks but bulging of the contact pads as well.
Credit: /u/Speedrookie on Reddit
Notably, AMD doesn’t say why the extra voltage was applied to the SoC in the first place, but it’s common for a company to avoid those details when in damage control mode. Still, kudos to AMD for moving so quickly, as it’s all happened in just the past three days. We recall when Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPUs were overheating, it took about two weeks to get a statement from the company about it. (To be fair to AMD, though, that all occurred over the New Year’s holiday.)
AMD also doesn’t specify which CPUs are affected. It’s safe to assume any Ryzen 7000-series chip could be in jeopardy due to the voltage settings governed by the motherboard BIOSes out there. The initial reporting concluded that although CPUs without V-Cache could also burn up, the models with extra L3 were assumed to be more vulnerable due to their sensitivity to voltage changes.
This is also a reminder that AMD’s warranty doesn’t cover any overclocking, including EXPO memory overclocking. In our initial report on this topic, we were surprised to learn that EXPO, which is built into the motherboard’s feature set, isn’t covered by warranty, so we stand corrected on that issue. Given the amount of attention this issue has received, it seems possible motherboard manufacturers and AMD may offer some leeway to avoid more bad press.
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