ASRock has issued a BIOS update for its AM5 Motherboards, aiming to resolve "CPU boot issues" with systems using the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor. ASRock's 3.20 beta BIOS has been issued to resolve a "minority proportion" of affected boards. The company also warned that "misinformation is spreading" about the reported failures.
In a news release shared by ASRock, the manufacturer states that the new beta BIOS update was issued in response to "reports on Reddit from users experiencing unexpected boot issues and error codes when using ASRock AM5 motherboards paired with minority proportion of AMD Ryzen™ 9000 series processors".
The statement issued by ASRock only specifies error codes and boot issues, not wholesale CPU failures.
Problems surfaced yesterday when a megathread on the ASRock subreddit revealed that users were faced with seemingly dead 9800X3D CPUs when placed in AM5-based ASRock motherboards. The thread detailed over 40 reports of the CPU seemingly giving up the ghost, with 32 reports stating that failures occurred on ASRock motherboards.
One fix that users found was to roll back to an older ASRock BIOS if they were experiencing issues. Reports claimed that some chips were failing during boot, or after several weeks of functioning normally.
Other users RMA'd non-functional CPUs, and put them back into an affected ASRock motherboard, and the system booted successfully, indicating that there may be something deeper going on.
ASRock Japan disclosed further details in in a post on X, claiming the CPUs themselves were not failing, but that they were tied to memory issues.
An excerpt from the Japanese language social media post (translated via DeepL) reads: "I will issue an official release with more details later, but I would like to say a few words since misinformation is spreading! As it turns out, it is not broken. It is an issue of some CPUs not booting due to memory compatibility issues."
The BIOS revision that ASRock was using may have caused issues with specific memory configurations. This could be why we did not see all users reporting issues with ASRock motherboards.
It is possible that the 3.20 beta BIOS update could potentially resolve these issues on the ASRock motherboards. However, it remains to be seen just how the new beta BIOS update will impact 9800X3D users.
Tom's Hardware has reached out to ASRock for further comment.
