AMD Ryzen 5000 ‘Zen 3’ desktop CPUs and X570 motherboards have high failure rates

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AMD’s Ryzen 5000 desktop CPUs based on the Zen 3 core architecture and the respective X570 motherboard platform have received rave reviews from the technical community and are considered one of AMD’s best CPU series to date, with insane performance. However, the custom DIY PC Builder, PowerGPU, reports that they are seeing very high failure rates with the new AMD CPU and motherboard platform.

AMD Ryzen 5000 ‘Zen 3’ desktop CPUs and X570 motherboards reportedly have high failure rates, several CPUs sent to PowerGPU DOA

PowerGPU tweeted that AMD’s Ryzen 5000 CPUs have very high failure rates and it is increasing with the more advanced CPU offering. Currently, AMD is struggling to keep up with the massive demand for its Ryzen 5000 and Ryzen 3000 CPUs, both of which are based on TSMC’s 7nm process node. Despite shipping one million Ryzen 5000 units in the previous quarter, AMD lost market share to Intel for the first time since the launch of the first Zen-based Ryzen series CPU.

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In the tweet, PowerGPU reports that of the 50 Ryzen 9 5950X units they received, 8 CPUs were DOA (Dead on Arrival). Following is the breakdown of AMD Ryzen 5000 CPU failure rate as reported by the custom DIY PC builder:

  • AMD Ryzen 5950x x50 units 8 doa
  • AMD Ryzen 5900x x50 units 4 doa
  • AMD Ryzen 5800x x100 units 4 doa
  • AMD Ryzen 5600x x120 units 3 doa

AMD Ryzen 5000 'Zen 3' desktop CPUs and X570 motherboards reportedly have high failure rates, several CPUs sent to PowerGPU DOA

At the same time, they report that they only received 1 Intel CPU in the same time that turned out to be DOA and that was a 9th generation Core i7-9700K chip. PowerGPU also mentions that prior to the launch of AMD’s Ryzen 5000 CPUs, the failure rate was 80% Intel and 20% AMD and they only had one CPU chip in the last 2 years. But since the launch of Ryzen 5000 CPUs, the chips are seeing higher failure rates. The problem isn’t just specific to the CPUs either, even X570 cards are reportedly facing very high failure rates.

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The company reports that they get at least 3-5 X570 and B550 motherboards every week, which eventually become DOA. It is not yet clear whether this is a production problem or something else. There are still plenty of people running their AMD Ryzen 5000 PC builds smoothly since launch, but given the high failure rate reported here, this is definitely something worth investigating. Others have reported issues where the USB 3 lanes on Ryzen 5000 CPUs were near dead and causing weird stability issues.

Updating: It seems these problems could be widespread within the DIY PC building community. Harukaze5719 spoke to a Korean DIY PC builder who reports similar defects and malfunctions when using Ryzen 5000 desktop CPUs on X570 / B550 motherboards.

In addition, 1usmus (Yuri Bubliy) states that, apart from DOA chips, Ryzen 5000 CPUs with poor FCLK overclocking capabilities and incorrect CPPC tags relative to FIT and temperature are not even included in these numbers.

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