Like Intel before it, AMD blames motherboard makers for burnt-out CPUs

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/like-intel-before-it-amd-blames-motherboard-makers-for-burnt-out-cpus/

by seemaze • 11 months ago

78 85 11 months ago

That's why I like Apple's vertical integration. If something breaks it's 100% their fault that they need to make right to the consumer, they can't tell you to GTFO and go blame someone else to escape responsibility.

jamesnorden• 11 months ago

Then can, and will, blame the consumer until forced to acknowledge it, sometimes by a class action lawsuit, like they have many times in the past.

taneliv• 11 months ago

You can surely buy integrated non-Apple systems like laptops, desktops and servers where the vendor fully bears the responsibility for correct system function.

DIY systems are perhaps the ones most affected by this, but I don't think Apple caters at all to that segment.

wat100002• 11 months ago

Right, Dell or Lenovo can no more tell their customer "not our problem, talk to Intel" than Toyota can say, "not our problem, talk to Takata." If you buy a motherboard and buy a CPU and put them together, only then do you get the opportunity to play these games.

folsom• 11 months ago

Yeah, next thing you know AMD will tell consumers they are holding it wrong.

bitmasher9• 11 months ago

It is nice to be able to replace your cpu, or install new memory, or use expansion slots. Not to mention being able to pick hardware that isn’t locked to a single operating system.

For me that’s well worth being liable for installation issues.

lazide• 11 months ago

It doesn’t sound like the concerns are necessarily installation related?

gwbas1c• 11 months ago

I had one of the giant Mac Pros from 2007, and I was able to change drives, RAM, and even replace the included graphics card when it fried. I even fixed my first Macbook pro from 2006. My more recent Macbooks haven't needed repair before the OS was end-of-life.

Personally, I don't miss it, as I'm 100% laptop. If I was into PC gaming, I'd probably have a desktop, but I prefer the simplicity of consoles.

FWIW: Most people who buy laptops are buying at a price point where it's "not worth it" to repair.

loloquwowndueo2• 11 months ago

Four words for you:

“You’re holding it wrong”

redleader55• 11 months ago

they can't tell you to GTFO and go blame someone else to escape responsibility

That sounds good in theory, but if it were true people like Louis Rossman who repair Apple phones and laptops and talk about Apple's treatment of customers wouldn't have millions of followers on YouTube.

sofixa• 11 months ago

Like the butterfly keyboard, which required a lawsuit for Apple to agree was defective and offer repairs for free in the first 4 years after buying it?

Ygg22• 11 months ago

If something breaks it's 100% their fault that they need to make right

"You're holding it wrong", Steve Jobs to a customer that covered their invisible antenna.

branko_d• 11 months ago

Most other brands had very similar problems (including my trusty Nokia at the time). You can still attenuate antennae on modern phones if you hold it just right. It's just a matter of physics.

Here is what Nokia N97 does when you "hold it wrong":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shR4jITiG48

mrheosuper• 11 months ago

Pretty sure they blamed the user holding their iphone wrong.

nashashmi3• 11 months ago

To Be fair, you are not supposed to hold in the one place where it disconnects

microtonal• 11 months ago

You mean like the butterfly keyboard in my MacBook Pro 2016, which could be destroyed by a few specs of dust, and took years for Apple to acknowledge?

trillic• 11 months ago

or the iPhone 4

Steve Jobs: "You're holding it wrong"

rwmj• 11 months ago

Or the Apple iBook G3 which had faulty soldering. (This affected mine.) Apple never acknowledged it.

mft_• 11 months ago

...or the widespread issue with the screen ribbon connector on the first generation of touchbar Macbook Pros (aka "Flexgate") which despite apparently identical symptoms and failure modes was fixed for free on the 13" model, but not on the 15" model? (At least, this was the outcome when I took mine to the Apple Store...)

sroussey• 11 months ago

Funny, but I had that butterfly keyboard for many years (until I got an M2) and never had a problem.

It’s no mechanical keyboard to the fingers, but it worked fine.

throwaway48476• 11 months ago

Like the flex connector on the display that was too short and cracked when you closed the lid?

nashashmi3• 11 months ago

Apple sells the hardware. That is why they are responsible. If dell sold the hardware , dell would be responsible .

AMD does not sell the motherboard. The motherboard sells the CPU. So motherboard is responsible.

But the relevance here is CPU is burning out because it is being plugged in by the end user. And the manufacturer is blaming the motherboard for their cpu burning. Maybe the cpu should be protective?

nashashmi3• 11 months ago

Looks like the motherboard might be sending more voltage than allowed causing the CPU to burn. So it is the motherboard's fault.

hu35• 11 months ago

Maybe this will open your eyes.

Dell support has flown a repair guy to my place with spare hardware pieces and fixed my pc in front of me. In my office. And I was partially to blame for the problem (I over clocked the CPU). I told them I did oc the CPU, they changed motherboard and processor anyways. For free.

So not only there are other verticals, but they are better.

runjake• 11 months ago

We just had a similar oopsie (water ingress) happen with a very expensive Dell server. We were upfront about what happened and wanted to pay for service. But in the end, they deployed a tech to repair it under warranty anyway.

That was a huge boost for Dell in my mind.

Spooky23• 11 months ago

All of these companies have good and bad stories. I’ve been in the IT biz for a long time and have lots of stories of heroics and villainy.

I can think of a bad one where a significant number of laptops and 1st party docking stations were deployed. There was an issue where in certain scenarios plugging into the dock would brick the dock. It affected ~5% of the population in 90 days. Vendor response: fuck you.

One of the interns working on desktop support at the org figured out that certain laptop serial number ranges were affected. She then popped it open and found what turned out to be a counterfeit chip.

Flying monkeys were released and the CEO of the vendor got a call. End result: ~$40-50M redeployment of everything, eaten by the vendor. If they had been accountable from the beginning, they likely would have recalled $3-5M of devices and spent $300-500k on deployment.

On the flip, I remember one scenario where an off warranty device failed before its replacement was ready (and the replacement was another vendor). The part wasn’t available locally, and the account exec ditched a conference in Chicago, picked up the part from a depot in Indiana and drove it to Massachusetts overnight, with a CE waiting for it in the lot.

kstrauser4• 11 months ago

The same Dell sold me a new monitor through their Amazon store, and when it broke a few months later — as that model became infamous for — Dell refused to replace it because their inventory system claimed I wasn’t the first owner: https://honeypot.net/2021/02/19/dell-doesnt-honor.html

Funny how experiences with the same company can be so drastically different. You got white glove service. I got service so bad that I used my veto power to keep an employer from ever spending a single penny with them.

smcin3• 11 months ago

Are you a business account with Dell? Roughly how much does your company spend with them per year?

Without knowing that, we can't put your anecdote in context.

rsynnott• 11 months ago

My mum had a Dell laptop whose power supply died after a few years. This was during the era when seemingly every model had a different supply. Dell essentially said "sorry, we don't make those anymore or have any remaining in stock, you're on your own".

It was a low-end one (their now-dead 'Vostro' brand), which may explain the service difference, I suppose.

ectospheno• 11 months ago

We use dell a lot where I work. Their fault rates aren’t noticeably better than others but their ability to fix problems is much better. Bios updates are provided well past warranty periods and the hardware they use is well supported by non-windows operating systems.

Last five pcs and laptops I bought personally were all Dell. Latest latitude I bought worked with OpenBSD with no issues.

atwrk• 11 months ago

Apple is the only company where I ever had to involve a lawyer to exercise my consumer rights (in Germany). They made notebooks with a design flaw that resulted in broken display cables from opening and closing the devices. My notebook broke 3 times, and at the third time I have the right to get my money back, which they refused (before involving said lawyer).

izacus• 11 months ago

Who asked you to drop an Apple ad in a completely unrelated topic?

anvuong• 11 months ago

Antenna gate? Bend gate? Butterfly keyboard? This kind of Apple fanboyism is why I hate Apple, even though I really enjoy using their Macs at work.

hangonhn• 11 months ago

Did you forget the iPhone 4 antenna debacle? Not only was the design problematic but Apple's gaslighting of everyone was terrible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_4#Antenna

Or what about the butterfly keyboard issue? https://www.pcmag.com/news/apple-finally-begins-distributing.... I can't believe I had to periodically use compressed air to get my keyboard working again. Again, they kept denying it was an issue.

brokenmachine2• 11 months ago

Check out Louis Rossmann's youtube channel for how well that logic works out.

God, there's SO many examples of Apple being terrible.

Jhsto• 11 months ago

Anecdotally, ASRock has been blamed also by Intel for shipping motherboards with NIC debug settings on: https://community.intel.com/t5/Ethernet-Products/1-out-of-2-...

SketchySeaBeast2• 11 months ago

The fact that the vast majority of these burnouts are on ASRock is a pretty big smoking gun to me. They're an attractive manufacturer because they're cheap, but at what cost?

tempest_2• 11 months ago

They are not always cheap though. They have been moving upmarket a bit the last 5 years.

Xss3• 11 months ago

Ive always liked asrock because they had a lot of control in the bios

tester7562• 11 months ago

My Ryzen recently died on Gigabyte.

perihelions• 11 months ago

Related thread,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45041743 ("GMP damaging Zen 5 CPUs? (gmplib.org)"—18 hours ago, 192 comments)

pdw• 11 months ago

From that article:

While similar, it is not the widely reported Asrock motherboard problem, as the motherboards we use are of a different make

tremon2• 11 months ago

That quote seems to imply that the issues are similar and therefore related?

dumbfounder• 11 months ago

If the motherboards are putting too much power into the chips, why isn’t it their fault?

kvemkon• 11 months ago

Isn't it the small embedded support CPU core within the CPU I/O die that controls voltages and frequencies? Sure it depends of what is configured in BIOS.

philjohn• 11 months ago

That I/O die will do little if sent hundreds of amps all of a sudden.

kickopotomus• 11 months ago

In part, yes, but the whole picture is a bit more complex. Intel and AMD both work with vendors to work out reference designs and power regulator configurations that are compatible with their CPUs. Modern power regulators are relatively complex, especially when you get into the high-end desktop and server space. There are a lot of things that can be done wrong and cause issues, such as voltage or current overshoot when the CPU moves between different power states (e.g. low to high load).

mort96• 11 months ago

Not a huge fan of that headline. It's completely plausible that motherboard vendors aren't following AMD's guidance and push the chips past their documented limits. It wouldn't be the first time, and it won't be the last.

The problem with Intel blaming 13th and 14th gen failures on motherboard manufacturers was that it happened even on motherboards which followed Intel's guidance to a T. This Ars Technica article doesn't seem to even try to make the argument that motherboard manufacturers are innocent, so the comparison to 13th and 14th gen failures is completely unwarranted.

Further, the article doesn't even investigate whether or not AMD's claim is correct. They could've compared AMD's max voltage specifications to the default settings configured by various motherboards.

glimshe• 11 months ago

Ars Technica is far from what it once was. It's now more political and leaning heavy on click bait.

cptnapalm• 11 months ago

I started seeing this more than a week ago on r/ASRock. There was a BIOS update and loads and loads of people reported that their CPUs fried.

hirvi74• 11 months ago

Call me paranoid, but I never update the BIOS unless I have no other option. I have seen way too many examples of things going wrong. Although, that was many moons ago, and perhaps with the reset switches and stuff these days things are not as bad as they once were.

Regardless, if ain't broken, don't break it.

Avamander• 11 months ago

Well, seeing how buggy motherboards are in general, I rather believe AMD when they say they're ignoring yet another crucial detail.

My previous Gigabyte motherboard had unstable TSC, incorrect IOMMU configuration, broken PSP and CPPC. My current Asus board also has C-state weirdness and broken ASPM and it killed one CPU(!) on default settings. I won't even go into all the bugs I've encountered with Lenovo laptops, ACPI bugs, ASPM bugs, Pluton bugs and so on and on.

rectang• 11 months ago

I would hate life if I had to debug those. The idea that there’s an entire market segment of people who tolerate such instability or even relish the task of debugging unreliable hardware boggles my mind.

nchmy• 11 months ago

Hetzner recently underwent a major maintenance project to replace all motherboards for their Ryzen 7xxx servers. Dont know if they used ASRock for those or not

https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/dedicated-server/general-info...

mason_mpls• 11 months ago

I’m far more inclined to trust any CPU manufacturer over a motherboard manufacturer.

NoPicklez• 11 months ago

After what's happened with Intel with their 13th and 14th gen CPU's that thought of mine is changing.

bicepjai• 11 months ago

It’s normal to expect AMD to put out list of supported motherboards and also test their chips on it right ? Then they can make the statement that the motherboard is not in our recommended list. Why do the blame game

SilentM682• 11 months ago

Having worked with a MOBO manufacturer, I would say that this is somewhat plausible though not necessarily the fault of the engineers. In my experience, both users and company administration, e.g. sales, CEOs have a lot to do with failures. An example, users are used to a particular MOBO brand, they want to try the new gadget-a video card usually, which requires much more power than the recommended power supply. They call tech support asking for an opinion, tech support talks to sales, sales will want to make the, well, sale. They typically did not ask the engineers for an opinion, as they are overseas, and instead query a direct manager, who will typically test the compatibility of the device and for a few days. When the device passes the test, they relate the good news to the sales department, who will then contact the user with the good news, an offer of a complete system. The user buys the system with the new video card, takes it for a ride. Three months later the user calls in reporting heating issues, tech support walks the user through some test, the user typically provides the results, tech support does not have an answer for the issue, they ask the user to send the unit in for testing and repair. Unit comes into the shop, board gets replaced, tested for three more days, passes all tests, gets shipped back to the user and issue pops up again, user gets irate, threatens to sue, nothing gets fixed. All because the bottom line is the $3000 dollars that was made in the sale. The issue eventually gets sent up the chain to engineers, they provide a BIOS fix, given to the user, user flashes. Issue is fixed, two years later, new Video Card comes in, user decides he needs that vid card, the never-ending cycle continues anew. I remember an instance where machines from a former employer was touted as a small low-heat server, really tiny, machine was made with substandard components, basically, cost-cutting at its best. Machines overheated, CPUs damaged, real shit show.

So yes, MOBO manufacturers, users bare equal responsibility, a chance to make lots of money & commission from the former, the need to be the first to try cutting edge technology without regards for proper safety, limitations and hardware compatibility, from the latter.

It seems that over the decades, people have failed to learn or neglected, Moore's Law's increasing physical limitations, because hey why not ;)

brokenmachine2• 11 months ago

users bare equal responsibility, a chance to make lots of money & commission from the former, the need to be the first to try cutting edge technology without regards for proper safety, limitations and hardware compatibility, from the latter.

The users do not bear responsibility here. It's up to the manufacturer to say no if it's not possible.

And why are managers testing new GPU/mobo combinations? A company run like that and not learning lessons deserves to fail.

SilentM682• 11 months ago

Inaccurate! Users' bare responsibility, because after being told that things will go wrong, users still went ahead and did it any ways, at least during my time in that industry. In my experience, the majority of the users that I dealt with were those fresh out of public college and education, where their brains were lobotomized during their time in school, and refuse to learn, even when the truth was in front of them.

Yes, a company like that and not learning lessons deserves to fail. The problem is that there are too many young uneducated graduates, that were never taught to distinguish the truth from myth. Garbage companies and their greed continue to take advantage of their naivety because they know the industry is f**ed and there is no real way to make a sustainable living. The economies are, have been, and will continue to be messed up. Just take a look around and see how jobs are nonexistent. Those jobs that do exists, are few and far between. People mostly get hired by knowing someone in a company, a friend, a family member that can recommend them. There will never be enough jobs for everyone.

Basically, the company is crap, a by-product of a long-declining, garbage-industry, based on political policies and lies from the past. It reminds me of the "Never-ending story,". Recycle, repeat! Recycle, repeat! Never Innovate :(

Sol Roth

ASMVal• 11 months ago

Eh, AMD did the same thing literally last gen. Telling us that moob manufacturers didn't follow spec while they did, it's just that the spec wasn't clear and amd changed it intel style right after it came out.

But it has to be said, that it in this specific instance it seems that only asorck is affected (and has been for months at this point thanks to GN investigation) so my bet is to just wait and see what happens.

Like Intel before it, AMD blames motherboard makers for burnt-out CPUs

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