What's the likelyhood of my ASRock x870e Taichi Lite motherboard blowing up my 9800X3D?

After hearing how many 9XXX CPU’s have been blown up by the newest ASRock motherboards, I’m worried that it’s only a matter of time till it happens to me.

Latest video from Tech Yes City on his ASRock mobo issues

My RIG
CPU : 9800X3D
MOBO: ASRock x870e Taichi Lite
RAM: G.SKILL Trident Z5 Neo RGB 64GB (2x32GB) DDR5 6000MHz CL30
STORAGE: 1TB SSD WD Blue
PSU: 1200W 80+ Gold Be Quiet Dark Pro

Background

This isn’t my first PC build. As of today everything works, but I haven’t updated the BIOS to the latest version 3.20. I’m on 3.14

The computer was on for maybe 50 hours tops. There have been some strange behaviors such as the board giving me a 31 error code indicating bad RAM. That was fixed by flipping the power button on the PSU, waiting 1 min and powering the PC back on.

I’m actually contemplating getting an affordable B650 mobo from Asus or any other brand besides ASRock. Is that necessary at this point, or am I just overreacting?

All comments are welcome.
Thank you for your time.

There’s existing threads on this

The reddit compilation has 157 failures at the moment but it’s unclear how many were fixable by BIOS update.

If you’re running the Z5s above 5600 and haven’t verified stability I’d check that first as Granite Ridge’s 1DPC 2R support bound’s 5600.

Huh, 157 is quite a bit… It’s still a small percentage but it’s atypical for CPUs to outright fail unless overclocked aggressively.

I probably wouldn’t. It’s hard to calculate odds from 157 anecdotal cases (not everyone posts about something like this – and who knows how many 9800x3d are out there), but it is for sure less than a percent. And if it does fail warranty should back you up. So unless it’s some scenario where your income depends on the system it’s not rational to spend a couple hundred to mitigate a (much smaller than) 1% chance of something happening.

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I recently put together a system with the taichi lite and a 9950x3d. I did upgrade to 3.20 which is working fine.

I came to the conclusion that if there was a BIOS fix to the burninating issue, ASRock would probably just release it and not tell anyone.

Gamer’s Nexus video on this recommended to keep BIOS at 3.10, which IIRC didn’t have any burning failures.

GN Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDX0l5kaYsc

Yup. And some of what’s being referred to as death is an ASRock BIOS bug which blocks post. That’s what the 3.20 BIOSes are supposed to fix and there’s plenty of reports 3.20 flashback does, indeed, cause some of the “dead” systems to post normally. But there’s reports 3.20 didn’t have any effect and lots of swapping in a different processor working fine. So it looks to me like Granite Ridge X3D probably has an early failure mode that AMD needs to sort out. (Or maybe it’s fixed but hasn’t saturated in channel yet.)

There’s at least a single digit number of cases of things getting in the socket or bent pins too. Those are presumably background failure rate getting rolled into the two or more other issues here.

Yeah, same. Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI all have failures too so it’s not like changing the board is a fix. It does seem to improve the odds by more than can be explained from just 3.20, so there might also be something with ASRock’s loadlines that makes X3D more likely to fail (or made, as @maker’s suggested).

If the 9900X or 9950X I’ve built quit I’ll RMA but for now there’s no meaningful action I can see to take. One reason I bumped them to 3.20 promptly is just in case it’s some kind of degradation thing.

The RAM is running at 6000 Mhz (AMD EXPO profile, no manual tweaking). RAM passed full memtest86 run without any problems.

I’ve seen the thread about the 157 dead 9800X3D’s, but I figured it would be better to make a separate post about my query.

Found something that may be of interest to the topic.

Tech Yes City thinks SOC Voltage could be the cause of the 9800X3D & mobo issues

I haven’t monitored mine, so I don’t have any data on that. Don’t think I’ll lose much if I apply the same setting on my mobo.

I’d like to thank everyone for their time in replying to my post.

Thank you very much and i hope you have a good day.

The other threads are linked for a reason.