After ASUS, an ASRock motherboard is now suspected of killing three Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPUs

Dead CPUs are no longer headline news. While they don't fail every other day, we have seen enough cases to know it's a real issue. In many of those situations, the motherboard is often the prime suspect because of its role in power delivery. That part isn't new. The unusual part would be seeing a single motherboard kill three CPUs, one after another, and that is exactly what this Reddit user claims to have experienced.

Reddit user u/notmemeber posted that their ASRock B850M Pro RS WiFi motherboard has killed three Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPUs over roughly 4 months. The user built the PC in January 2025, with the first CPU dying around November. The next died just a couple of months later, followed by a third going down within a month of the replacement arriving.

Whether coincidence or not, the board killed each CPU faster than the last, and it's hard to write this off as just bad luck. The user also noted that the first two deaths came with the same CPU and DRAM lights on the motherboard, but the third was different, showing a solid green BOOT light with no display at all. Same result, but different warning signs each time. Perhaps something was progressively getting worse with each replacement. It's also worth pointing out that the third CPU died on the latest 4.X BIOS versions, meaning the updates ASRock had been pushing out did nothing to stop it.

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Others have also shared similar experiences under the post, with one user commenting that their ASRock board killed their 9800X3D last summer, and they immediately decided to switch motherboards. Replacing the board sooner might have also saved this user from three CPU replacements.

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Interestingly, this isn't the first time a motherboard has been linked to sudden Ryzen CPU deaths. We previously covered an ASUS case where an X870 board nuked a user's Ryzen 7 9800X3D and then the replacement 9850X3D as well.

ASRock has already responded to the broader issue with internal reviews and multiple BIOS updates, including a February statement tied to AGESA 1.3.0.0a that was meant to address no-boot problems on affected AM5 systems. But reports like this one of Ryzen 7 9800X3D chips still dying on newer firmware suggest the fix hasn't really fixed anything. We have yet to see whether ASRock will comment on these specific cases and offer any form of compensation to the affected users if the board is confirmed as the culprit.