AMD and its board partners came under fire a while back as multiple reports of dying Ryzen 7000X3D CPUs surfaced simultaneously. The culprit was excessive voltage enabled by AIBs to give their boards an advantage among enthusiasts. In the aftermath, AMD issued a guideline recommending all its board partners limit the CPU voltage to 1.3v. Most vendors initially conformed to this, but some are rolling back to the initial state.
Gigabyte and ASUS have released new firmware for their AM5 users, but neither effectively set the voltage limit to 1.3v. ASUS, in particular, rolled out a buggy beta BIOS that worsened the problem and then stated that hardware damaged by it won’t be RMA’d. Of course, this didn’t sit well with consumers, and the manufacturer was forced to withdraw its statement, but the damage was done.
Further investigations have proved that the Ryzen 7000 non-X3D CPUs are also affected by this issue. It surfaced with Raphael-X because the 3D V-Cache die makes the CCD run considerably hotter. Despite that, the RMA rates for Zen 4 are lower than Zen 3, indicating that only a small fraction of users faced this problem.
The X670E Aorus Master is Gigabyte’s AM5 flagship. High-end boards like these are limited to enthusiasts and overclockers, and despite that, the vendor is yet to implement the 1.3v limit. When using AMD EXPO (memory overclocking), the Aorus Master automatically sets a voltage limit as high as 1.4v. Tests by HW Busters show the motherboard delivering voltages of up to 1.416v during stress tests like Prime95 using the F7 BIOS.
Updating to the latest F10D firmware doesn’t fix the problem either, with a peak voltage of 1.361v, well above the 1.3v recommendation from AMD. Luckily for gamers, thanks to the widespread coverage, no board partner will deny an RMA even if they’re at fault.
