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ASRock says its Precision Boost Overdrive settings caused Ryzen 9000 CPU failures

A few months ago, users were reporting that their AMD CPUs were failing to boot. This was happening primarily on ASRock AM5 motherboards, and now the company says it has identified the problem.

YouTube channel Tech Yes City claims that ASRock's investigation discovered that the issue is related to AMD's Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO). This feature is an automatic overclocking feature for Ryzen CPUs, which uses an algorithm to dynamically adjust the power limits, voltages, clock speeds.

Specifically, it appears to be an amperage problem that affects the Electric Design Current (EDC) and Thermal Design Current (TDC) on ASRock motherboards. ASRock representatives stated that the motherboards were configured too aggressively to handle the PBO for Ryzen 9000 CPUs. It would result in EDC and TDC being set at a higher range for early CPU samples, which ended up in the processors dying prematurely, especially on mid-range and high-end motherboards.

ASRock says that the PBO issues have been fixed in the latest BIOS update that it has released. The company has also clarified that its budget motherboards should not be affected by the issue. But ASRock users were not impressed by this announcement, and have called out the company for trying to shift the blame. Questions are also being raised about the fix, and whether it actually solves the problem. AMD has not released a statement about this.

Meanwhile, More than Moore's Dr. Ian Cutress says that an engineer told him that certain versions of Ryzen Master will put the CPU in PBO mode automatically when the app is installed. But, it won't tell you that the mode is enabled. This cannot be blocked via the BIOS, and the only workaround is to open the app, enable the feature and disable it manually.

Tom's Hardware reports that ASRock had initially dismissed the motherboard failure reports as misinformation, and even denied that the problems were due to memory incompatibilities, and that it should release a public advisory to alert users about the BIOS update and protect potential failures.

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