Yesterday, on the PCMR subreddit, u/t0pli posted a photograph of a Ryzen 7 9800X3D, one of the best CPUs, with visibly damaged pin contacts and a motherboard socket scuffed in the same place.
This is the third report of a Ryzen 7 9800X3D burnout, although the two previous cases were on MSI X870 motherboards. Redditor u/t0pli's Ryzen 7 9800X3D was reportedly paired with an ASRock Nova x870E motherboard and had worked perfectly fine for the past three weeks until suddenly and spontaneously failing one day. The failure prompted the user to share the photographs and subsequent Reddit posting.
The incident could be an apparent case of the CPU failing. It happens more than you think. Considering how long the Ryzen 7 9800X3D worked before the burnout, it's a high possibility. Nonetheless, some further details reported by the user could point toward different issues.
For one, debris with differing colors from the surrounding environment seems to be stuck in the field of pins. The foreign material between the CPU and CPU pins could have contributed to a short-out. However, concluding what got stuck in the CPU socket is hard. It is possible that the electric error was severe enough to cause discoloration and material warping without any debris.
Another possible cause of the failure is a bent pin. The AM5 socket may have had one or two bent pins, which the user may have missed during installation. A bent pin touching the wrong CPU contact can also cause a short-out and explain the burn marks.
The Redditor confirmed that he only enabled the AMD EXPO profile for his memory. We can't definitely say EXPO was the culprit until the system is analyzed. However, there is a precedent of EXPO and SoC voltages killing previous Ryzen 7000 chips. However, those issues have been resolved, so that's not likely the case here with the Ryzen 7 9800X3D.
Whatever the situation truly is, with the PC being sent to a repair shop to determine RMA status at the time of writing, it still seems odd that the CPU would enjoy seamless operation for a whole three weeks before spontaneously having a few pins melt and explode, especially if foreign material was already inside the CPU socket when it was mounted. One would reasonably assume that whatever the problem was here, it should result in a complete system crash much sooner than it did.
