News flash for PC builders, particularly those who use an ASRock motherboard with an AMD Ryzen 9000 series processor. Rumors from the Computex 2025 show is that ASRock might be coyly admitting that there is a serious issue with their boards which seem to be giving extra 'pep' to the already powerful new CPUs.
According to Tech Yes City, a YouTuber who interacted with ASRock in Computex, the culprit points to a too enthusiastic setting of Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO). If you still do not know about PBO, it is an AMD magical thing that dynamically pushes your CPU clock speeds based on the temperature, power, and load, resulting in the highest peak.
However, it seems that ASRock's initial builds had a little too much leniency. Although complaints of overheating of Ryzen 7 9800X3D and other 9000-series chips and some unfortunate failures started surfacing as soon as February 2024, liquid-cooling setups ironically made matters worse by allowing the system to sustain high frequency, which could be damaging, for a longer time.
At first, ASRock allegedly rejected the issue. However, BIOS updates started coming in, stating "improved compatibility" and voltage reductions as features. In these new versions of BIOS, areas of difference under visible settings do not appear to have changed radically, but it is alleged that the hidden voltage levels not exposed to users were tweaked downward.
If Computex reports are correct, it seems the company acknowledged that their early BIOS offerings had inflated current values (like EDC and TDC) and pumped too much voltage through the processors.
It is essential to mention that as of now and in the future, ASRock and AMD are sync. Neither of them has passed any official public statement regarding this.
So, in case of problems on your Ryzen 9000 chip housed inside an ASRock board or even considering such a build, this is definitely something to keep an eye on. Have your BIOS updated to the latest version, and here's to hoping for more official clarity soon.
