Re: Asus announces 'immediate internal review' of 800-series motherboards following string of 9800X3D failures ....

"Mr. Man-wai Chang" <[email protected]> wrote:

> Asus announces 'immediate internal review' of 800-series motherboards 
> following string of 9800X3D failures — users report multiple chip 
> failures in recent days | Tom's Hardware
> <https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/motherboards/asus-announces-immediate-internal-review-of-800-series-motherboards-following-string-of-9800x3d-failures-users-report-multiple-chip-failures-in-recent-days>
(January 23, 2026)

""We are aware of recent reports concerning AMD Ryzen™ 7 9800X3D CPUs
and ASUS AMD 800-series motherboards, and we have initiated an immediate
internal review," ...

"While the 9800X3D has been the victim of multiple reports of failures,
these have previously been largely confined to ASRock motherboards."

I have an Asrock Z390 Taichi mobo, but Intel, not AMD.  Asrock is a
spinoff from ASUS.  Got it back in April 2019.  I switched on Secure
Boot, but ran into software using unsigned drivers, and Secure Boot
doesn't like that.  When I disabled Secure Boot, the mobo wouldn't boot
anymore.  Couldn't even get to the POST screen.  Couldn't burn in the
lastest BIOS firmware, either.  Wouldn't boot that far to read drives to
load the flash program.  After working on it for days, and almost 3 days
with Asrock support, they decided to swap the motherboard.  The software
dev eventually signed their driver, so I could enable Secure Boot, but
if I do then I won't be disabling it.  Never bothered flashing to later
firmware, either, but the replacement mobo did have a later version.

The article doesn't mention Secure Boot, but it isn't clear just what
were the failures.  It mentions ASUS suggests burning in new firmware
for BIOS, so maybe some of their code was incompatible with the AMD
Ryzen 7 9800X3D which came out this January.  However, the article says
ASUS is looking into all their 800 series mobos (which sounds like
they're discussing the chipset, not CPU), and those came out in 2009.

Wikipedia also has their own blurb on the failures:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASRock#Ryzen_9000_CPU_failures_on_AM5_motherboards

mentioning the failures were known back to Feb 2025, a year before the 
Tom's Hardware article.  All of that started 6 years after my Asrock
failure with Secure Boot, so the boot failures noted in the article may
be due to other firmware code in BIOS, and maybe only regarding AMD.

Since the BIOS firmware probably comes from American Megatrends (AMI),
wonder if the fault lies with ASUS/Asrock or AMI.