Like Intel before it, AMD blames motherboard makers for burnt-out CPUs

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/like-intel-before-it-amd-blames-motherboard-makers-for-burnt-out-cpus/

74•seemaze•2d ago

Comments

FirmwareBurner•6h ago

That's why I like Apple's vertical integration. If something breaks it's 100% their fault that they need to make right to the consumer, they can't tell you to GTFO and go blame someone else to escape responsibility.

jamesnorden•6h ago

Then can, and will, blame the consumer until forced to acknowledge it, sometimes by a class action lawsuit, like they have many times in the past.

taneliv•6h ago

You can surely buy integrated non-Apple systems like laptops, desktops and servers where the vendor fully bears the responsibility for correct system function.

DIY systems are perhaps the ones most affected by this, but I don't think Apple caters at all to that segment.

wat10000•3h ago

Right, Dell or Lenovo can no more tell their customer "not our problem, talk to Intel" than Toyota can say, "not our problem, talk to Takata." If you buy a motherboard and buy a CPU and put them together, only then do you get the opportunity to play these games.

folsom•6h ago

Yeah, next thing you know AMD will tell consumers they are holding it wrong.

bitmasher9•6h ago

It is nice to be able to replace your cpu, or install new memory, or use expansion slots. Not to mention being able to pick hardware that isn’t locked to a single operating system.

For me that’s well worth being liable for installation issues.

lazide•5h ago

It doesn’t sound like the concerns are necessarily installation related?

gwbas1c•5h ago

I had one of the giant Mac Pros from 2007, and I was able to change drives, RAM, and even replace the included graphics card when it fried. I even fixed my first Macbook pro from 2006. My more recent Macbooks haven't needed repair before the OS was end-of-life.

Personally, I don't miss it, as I'm 100% laptop. If I was into PC gaming, I'd probably have a desktop, but I prefer the simplicity of consoles.

FWIW: Most people who buy laptops are buying at a price point where it's "not worth it" to repair.

wat10000•3h ago

The current Mac Pro offers upgradeable storage, and PCIe slots (but they don't support video cards). The CPU and RAM can no longer be upgraded. It's also tremendously expensive, $7,000 for the base model. (That 2007 model started at $2,200!)

I miss it a little. I have a 16GB MacBook Pro that I wouldn't mind adding more RAM to. But I think it's a worthwhile tradeoff for better performance, size, and power consumption.

loloquwowndueo•6h ago

Four words for you:

“You’re holding it wrong”

redleader55•5h ago

> they can't tell you to GTFO and go blame someone else to escape responsibility

That sounds good in theory, but if it were true people like Louis Rossman who repair Apple phones and laptops and talk about Apple's treatment of customers wouldn't have millions of followers on YouTube.

sofixa•5h ago

Like the butterfly keyboard, which required a lawsuit for Apple to agree was defective and offer repairs for free in the first 4 years after buying it?

Ygg2•5h ago

> If something breaks it's 100% their fault that they need to make right

"You're holding it wrong", Steve Jobs to a customer that covered their invisible antenna.

branko_d•4h ago

Most other brands had very similar problems (including my trusty Nokia at the time). You can still attenuate antennae on modern phones if you hold it just right. It's just a matter of physics.

Here is what Nokia N97 does when you "hold it wrong":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shR4jITiG48

mrheosuper•5h ago

Pretty sure they blamed the user holding their iphone wrong.

nashashmi•5h ago

To Be fair, you are not supposed to hold in the one place where it disconnects

loloquwowndueo•4h ago

To be fair, it should not disconnect if you hold it in a place that’s not clearly marked “it will disconnect if you touch here”. :)

fwip•2h ago

Was there anything in the product manual or packaging to tell the user this?

danieldk•5h ago

You mean like the butterfly keyboard in my MacBook Pro 2016, which could be destroyed by a few specs of dust, and took years for Apple to acknowledge?

trillic•5h ago

or the iPhone 4

Steve Jobs: "You're holding it wrong"

tempest_•5h ago

Or the generation that where the graphics cards were de-soldering themselves

glitchc•4h ago

I still have a mid-2010 Macbook Pro collecting dust somewhere.

rwmj•5h ago

Or the Apple iBook G3 which had faulty soldering. (This affected mine.) Apple never acknowledged it.

mft_•4h ago

...or the widespread issue with the screen ribbon connector on the first generation of touchbar Macbook Pros (aka "Flexgate") which despite apparently identical symptoms and failure modes was fixed for free on the 13" model, but not on the 15" model? (At least, this was the outcome when I took mine to the Apple Store...)

sroussey•3h ago

Funny, but I had that butterfly keyboard for many years (until I got an M2) and never had a problem.

It’s no mechanical keyboard to the fingers, but it worked fine.

lupusreal•2h ago

Fine dog hair is kryptonite to it, and similar keyboards from other manufacturers. Its a fine design if you live in a clean room.

throwaway48476•5h ago

Like the flex connector on the display that was too short and cracked when you closed the lid?

nashashmi•5h ago

Apple sells the hardware. That is why they are responsible. If dell sold the hardware , dell would be responsible .

AMD does not sell the motherboard. The motherboard sells the CPU. So motherboard is responsible.

But the relevance here is CPU is burning out because it is being plugged in by the end user. And the manufacturer is blaming the motherboard for their cpu burning. Maybe the cpu should be protective?

nashashmi•3h ago

Looks like the motherboard might be sending more voltage than allowed causing the CPU to burn. So it is the motherboard's fault.

hu3•5h ago

Maybe this will open your eyes.

Dell support has flown a repair guy to my place with spare hardware pieces and fixed my pc in front of me. In my office. And I was partially to blame for the problem (I over clocked the CPU). I told them I did oc the CPU, they changed motherboard and processor anyways. For free.

So not only there are other verticals, but they are better.

runjake•4h ago

We just had a similar oopsie (water ingress) happen with a very expensive Dell server. We were upfront about what happened and wanted to pay for service. But in the end, they deployed a tech to repair it under warranty anyway.

That was a huge boost for Dell in my mind.

hu3•4h ago

Yeah their warranty is legendary.

In my case, flying someone to my place alone was more expensive than the parts they replaced.

Spooky23•4h ago

All of these companies have good and bad stories. I’ve been in the IT biz for a long time and have lots of stories of heroics and villainy.

I can think of a bad one where a significant number of laptops and 1st party docking stations were deployed. There was an issue where in certain scenarios plugging into the dock would brick the dock. It affected ~5% of the population in 90 days. Vendor response: fuck you.

One of the interns working on desktop support at the org figured out that certain laptop serial number ranges were affected. She then popped it open and found what turned out to be a counterfeit chip.

Flying monkeys were released and the CEO of the vendor got a call. End result: ~$40-50M redeployment of everything, eaten by the vendor. If they had been accountable from the beginning, they likely would have recalled $3-5M of devices and spent $300-500k on deployment.

On the flip, I remember one scenario where an off warranty device failed before its replacement was ready (and the replacement was another vendor). The part wasn’t available locally, and the account exec ditched a conference in Chicago, picked up the part from a depot in Indiana and drove it to Massachusetts overnight, with a CE waiting for it in the lot.

dcrazy•4h ago

I’d love to know how the intern figured out the chip was counterfeit!

dmvdoug•3h ago

It’s almost like what really matters when something goes wrong is who responds to the incident. There are individual human beings who genuinely give a shit about customer service, and will move heaven and earth in order to help customers. And then there are other individual human beings who want to do as little as possible, when confronted with an issue, and blaming the customer is often the shortest route to minimal work.

It really doesn’t matter what the organization’s policies and procedures are. At most, an organization’s culture may affect this, by nudging marginal cases to align with the culture. But in the end, it always comes down to individual human beings.

dehrmann•2h ago

Hope they got the intern of the year award.

kstrauser•4h ago

The same Dell sold me a new monitor through their Amazon store, and when it broke a few months later — as that model became infamous for — Dell refused to replace it because their inventory system claimed I wasn’t the first owner: https://honeypot.net/2021/02/19/dell-doesnt-honor.html

Funny how experiences with the same company can be so drastically different. You got white glove service. I got service so bad that I used my veto power to keep an employer from ever spending a single penny with them.

bravetraveler•4h ago

The other poster likely presented themselves as a company, service contract and all: you presented yourself as a retail customer, thanks to Amazon

They offer... what? The same insurance one might get at Boost Mobile.

edit: To be fair, I haven't read your link/agree in spirit: faulty is faulty, responsibility, etc. There is a difference, though.

kstrauser•3h ago

Oh, sure. They’re not going to fly someone out to fix a retail customer’s monitor. I get that and would never expect that level of service.

And yet, they doubled down hard on refusing to replace my defective 6 month old, still under warranty, screen. Amazon was the hero in this story. They listened to my story and gave me a refund, which I spent with a different brand.

It felt wonderful explaining to their enterprise rep why we were rejecting their bid and going with a different vendor.

tremon•2h ago

Ah yes. I've also had the joy of telling off a professional account manager because of piss-poor consumer support (in my case, it was DHL). It's a great feeling :)

kstrauser•2h ago

The opportunity is rare, but wow, was that ever satisfying.

ptx•3h ago

Could this be because of Amazon's "commingling" [1], where they throw products ordered from different stores all in one big pile, mixing the counterfeits with the real ones?

[1] https://www.buffalo.edu/news/tipsheets/2024/amazon-commingli...

kstrauser•2h ago

Maybe, but that should be between Dell and Amazon. I bought it through Dell’s store in Amazon, so Dell put their endorsement on the buying process.

smcin•3h ago

Are you a business account with Dell? Roughly how much does your company spend with them per year?

Without knowing that, we can't put your anecdote in context.

hu3•3h ago

No it's just Dell extended warranty. They call it "Dell Care Plus".

Just try to buy a desktop machine and you'll see it as an option.

An example: https://i.imgur.com/sSVnfjb.png

The important part: "On-location repairs, by Dell certified technicians, after remote diagnosis (1-2 business days)".

There's no special business contract or paperwork involved.

And you can get it for free in promos. Like it did.

smcin•3m ago

Yeah I know about their extended warranty; then their responsiveness is obviously due to the extended warranty, not any comparative admission of liability.

As to "Dell support has flown a repair guy to my place with spare hardware pieces ". You don't know that he wasn't already planning to fly to your area for 5+ other customers anyway. Also it's a less impressive story if you live in a heavily tech area than if you live in the Ozarks. Flights can often be cheaper than driving, and the rep has less dead/travel time and can service other customers or whatever.

I looked at Dell extended warranties before (can be ~about as expensive as the machine itself, over 3yrs) and figured that if you're buying with your own money, you can do better with due diligence on which specific year-models are/aren't reliable and what each component costs to replace, also couple that with a selective backup strategy. As long as you're not too remote.

rsynnott•2h ago

My mum had a Dell laptop whose power supply died after a few years. This was during the era when seemingly every model had a different supply. Dell essentially said "sorry, we don't make those anymore or have any remaining in stock, you're on your own".

It was a low-end one (their now-dead 'Vostro' brand), which may explain the service difference, I suppose.

ectospheno•2h ago

We use dell a lot where I work. Their fault rates aren’t noticeably better than others but their ability to fix problems is much better. Bios updates are provided well past warranty periods and the hardware they use is well supported by non-windows operating systems.

Last five pcs and laptops I bought personally were all Dell. Latest latitude I bought worked with OpenBSD with no issues.

atwrk•4h ago

Apple is the only company where I ever had to involve a lawyer to exercise my consumer rights (in Germany). They made notebooks with a design flaw that resulted in broken display cables from opening and closing the devices. My notebook broke 3 times, and at the third time I have the right to get my money back, which they refused (before involving said lawyer).

izacus•4h ago

Who asked you to drop an Apple ad in a completely unrelated topic?

anvuong•3h ago

Antenna gate? Bend gate? Butterfly keyboard? This kind of Apple fanboyism is why I hate Apple, even though I really enjoy using their Macs at work.

hangonhn•3h ago

Did you forget the iPhone 4 antenna debacle? Not only was the design problematic but Apple's gaslighting of everyone was terrible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_4#Antenna

Or what about the butterfly keyboard issue? https://www.pcmag.com/news/apple-finally-begins-distributing.... I can't believe I had to periodically use compressed air to get my keyboard working again. Again, they kept denying it was an issue.

Jhsto•5h ago

Anecdotally, ASRock has been blamed also by Intel for shipping motherboards with NIC debug settings on: https://community.intel.com/t5/Ethernet-Products/1-out-of-2-...

SketchySeaBeast•5h ago

The fact that the vast majority of these burnouts are on ASRock is a pretty big smoking gun to me. They're an attractive manufacturer because they're cheap, but at what cost?

tempest_•5h ago

They are not always cheap though. They have been moving upmarket a bit the last 5 years.

perihelions•5h ago

Related thread,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45041743 ("GMP damaging Zen 5 CPUs? (gmplib.org)"—18 hours ago, 192 comments)

pdw•3h ago

From that article:

> While similar, it is not the widely reported Asrock motherboard problem, as the motherboards we use are of a different make

tremon•2h ago

That quote seems to imply that the issues are similar and therefore related?

dumbfounder•5h ago

If the motherboards are putting too much power into the chips, why isn’t it their fault?

kvemkon•4h ago

Isn't it the small embedded support CPU core within the CPU I/O die that controls voltages and frequencies? Sure it depends of what is configured in BIOS.

philjohn•3h ago

That I/O die will do little if sent hundreds of amps all of a sudden.

mort96•4h ago

Not a huge fan of that headline. It's completely plausible that motherboard vendors aren't following AMD's guidance and push the chips past their documented limits. It wouldn't be the first time, and it won't be the last.

The problem with Intel blaming 13th and 14th gen failures on motherboard manufacturers was that it happened even on motherboards which followed Intel's guidance to a T. This Ars Technica article doesn't seem to even try to make the argument that motherboard manufacturers are innocent, so the comparison to 13th and 14th gen failures is completely unwarranted.

Further, the article doesn't even investigate whether or not AMD's claim is correct. They could've compared AMD's max voltage specifications to the default settings configured by various motherboards.

glimshe•2h ago

Ars Technica is far from what it once was. It's now more political and leaning heavy on click bait.

cptnapalm•4h ago

I started seeing this more than a week ago on r/ASRock. There was a BIOS update and loads and loads of people reported that their CPUs fried.

hirvi74•2h ago

Call me paranoid, but I never update the BIOS unless I have no other option. I have seen way too many examples of things going wrong. Although, that was many moons ago, and perhaps with the reset switches and stuff these days things are not as bad as they once were.

Regardless, if ain't broken, don't break it.

Avamander•3h ago

Well, seeing how buggy motherboards are in general, I rather believe AMD when they say they're ignoring yet another crucial detail.

My previous Gigabyte motherboard had unstable TSC, incorrect IOMMU configuration, broken PSP and CPPC. My current Asus board also has C-state weirdness and broken ASPM and it killed one CPU(!) on default settings. I won't even go into all the bugs I've encountered with Lenovo laptops, ACPI bugs, ASPM bugs, Pluton bugs and so on and on.

nchmy•2h ago

Hetzner recently underwent a major maintenance project to replace all motherboards for their Ryzen 7xxx servers. Dont know if they used ASRock for those or not

https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/dedicated-server/general-info...

mason_mpls•2h ago

I’m far more inclined to trust any CPU manufacturer over a motherboard manufacturer.

bicepjai•2h ago

It’s normal to expect AMD to put out list of supported motherboards and also test their chips on it right ? Then they can make the statement that the motherboard is not in our recommended list. Why do the blame game

SilentM68•53m ago

Having worked with a MOBO manufacturer, I would say that this is somewhat plausible though not necessarily the fault of the engineers. In my experience, both users and company administration, e.g. sales, CEOs have a lot to do with failures. An example, users are used to a particular MOBO brand, they want to try the new gadget-a video card usually, which requires much more power than the recommended power supply. They call tech support asking for an opinion, tech support talks to sales, sales will want to make the, well, sale. They typically did not ask the engineers for an opinion, as they are overseas, and instead query a direct manager, who will typically test the compatibility of the device and for a few days. When the device passes the test, they relate the good news to the sales department, who will then contact the user with the good news, an offer of a complete system. The user buys the system with the new video card, takes it for a ride. Three months later the user calls in reporting heating issues, tech support walks the user through some test, the user typically provides the results, tech support does not have an answer for the issue, they ask the user to send the unit in for testing and repair. Unit comes into the shop, board gets replaced, tested for three more days, passes all tests, gets shipped back to the user and issue pops up again, user gets irate, threatens to sue, nothing gets fixed. All because the bottom line is the $3000 dollars that was made in the sale. The issue eventually gets sent up the chain to engineers, they provide a BIOS fix, given to the user, user flashes. Issue is fixed, two years later, new Video Card comes in, user decides he needs that vid card, the never-ending cycle continues anew. I remember an instance where machines from a former employer was touted as a small low-heat server, really tiny, machine was made with substandard components, basically, cost-cutting at its best. Machines overheated, CPUs damaged, real shit show.

So yes, MOBO manufacturers, users bare equal responsibility, a chance to make lots of money & commission from the former, the need to be the first to try cutting edge technology without regards for proper safety, limitations and hardware compatibility, from the latter.

It seems that over the decades, people have failed to learn or neglected, Moore's Law's increasing physical limitations, because hey why not ;)

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