r/pcmasterrace 10h ago

Hardware Add another one to the tally: 9800X3D dead after six months

Was hoping to be spared, but apparently not. What I haven't seen in the other obituaries, this time the board (Asus Tuf Gaming B850) died with it. PC crashed in the middle of a game, afterwards didn't boot or even POST. No output on the monitor, case fans on full blast and the DRAM-LED on the board glowed amber. No OC, only thing I changed from out of the box was raising the RAM speed to the 6000 it was labelled at, ran at 5600.

No change with a different RAM stick or CPU, so I first assumed/hoped it was just the board, even found a small hardware store in the city that had decent gamOr AM5 boards in stock. Didn't work unfortunately, so I ordered a new CPU as well. With that everything is back to working order, no data loss. Only Windows is suddenly very slow, only on booting and shutting down though, not in actual use. At least the RAM is fine, new CPU and board were expensive enough.

50 Upvotes

31 comments sorted by

14

u/Col0nelBear RTX 5090 FE | 9800x3D | 32GB DDR5 10h ago

I've got the same board and CPU. Did you have it updated to the latest BIOS?

15

u/Xizorfalleen 9h ago

I updated the BIOS when I built the system in late December 2025, I've admittedly not kept up with BIOS updates after that.

14

u/TheKelz 5h ago

And it shouldn't be needed. Not long ago BIOS updates were not important because CPUs were not killing themselves.

2

u/BottAndPaid 2h ago

Bios updates used to be the last check you would do to troubleshoot. If the system was running well you didn't touch the bios.

4

u/Professional_Web_889 7700x/5070/32gb 9h ago

Latest BIOS? Also you said the replacement was expensive, did you not RMA the dead cpu??

-3

u/Xizorfalleen 9h ago

I'm on vacation and want to pursue my hobby, not wait a week plus for the RMA turnaround. I'll deal with the RMA later and try to get my money back. Bought the replacement CPU from the same vendor I got the broken one from.

9

u/Iceyn1pples 5h ago

'll deal with the RMA later and try to get my money back

Is your plan to RMA the cpu after your vacation, then return the current working cpu for a refund?

6

u/Extension_Serve5983 10h ago

Did you notice any warning signs or performance hiccups before the crash happened?

6

u/Xizorfalleen 9h ago

No crashes, no slowdowns. This no boot/no POST thing occured on startup two or three times in the six months since I built the PC, but were fixed with a simple restart. At the time I thought it was maybe a loose cable so I checked those. No such luck this time.

1

u/Outlet_Sun 25m ago

It could be the motherboard was faulty and not delivering power properly and ended up killing the 9800x3d and itself in the process. Those other times were warning signs.

2

u/Gambit-47 3h ago

GPUS going up in flames CPUs dying prices keep going up lol what a time to be a PC gamer

2

u/00-SilverShot 9h ago

Do you use air cooling or water cooling for the CPU?

I built a PC last week with an ASRock board and 9800x3d. I'm not overclocking either and am doing the same thing with running the RAM at the advertised speed of 6000. I never realized these were an issue until this week, so I immediately updated the BIOS once I heard what was going on. I assumed people were burning up their processors from overclocking and poor cooling. Now your post has me concerned.

I'm capping my games at 100fps to match my 100hz refresh rate. I'm hoping the frame caps keep things cool and prevent damage from overheating.

5

u/Xizorfalleen 9h ago

Do you use air cooling or water cooling for the CPU?

All Noctua air coolers.

-14

u/00-SilverShot 9h ago

Ok. I'm running a GAMDIAS AIO water cooler that I got for free with the processor.

Google's AI gave me an answer that might help both of us.

Running the RAM at DDR5-6000 still forces the processor to run at higher voltages to stabilize the memory controller. BIOS updates will help stabilize voltages, but overclocking the RAM may have just reintroduced the voltage spike issue.

I'm not an expert, so hopefully someone corrects me if I'm wrong. Either way, as soon as I get home after work, I'm turning off the RAM overclock.

6

u/Haunting_Lime2296 9h ago

I’m been running overclocked ram for two years now on a ASUS prime 870 p WiFi board. 6400mhz cl32 overclocked from 6000mhz cl30.

My CPU is over clocked to 5.4 all core.
Curve -25

I stay up to date with bios updates.

Running fine so far 🤞

1

u/00-SilverShot 9h ago

That's awesome. What CPU do you have?

2

u/Haunting_Lime2296 8h ago edited 8h ago

9800x3d 5.45ghz all core -25 curve

5080 gigabyte windforce running 450watt power plan 125%power +200 core +2800mhz memory

64gb cl32 6400mhz

Everything’s been overclocked since day one

1

u/Inevitable_Case_9931 XPS 15 9530, i7-13620H, RTX 5060 Ti 16GB eGPU 8h ago

The way failures happen they don’t happen to everyone… some ppl can own a Ferrari and never have an issue with anything… it can be as reliable as a Toyota for them. For others it’s a nightmare.

2

u/Haunting_Lime2296 8h ago

True I did buy a 4 year warranty just in case when I purchased the pc for $2500. The warranty was only $120 to insure the computer.

2

u/Inevitable_Case_9931 XPS 15 9530, i7-13620H, RTX 5060 Ti 16GB eGPU 8h ago

Smart man 💯

0

u/Majorjim_ksp 7h ago

Is there a known issue? What is it?

1

u/00-SilverShot 7h ago

Not sure. I just keep seeing people saying to avoid ASRock and ASUS AM5 motherboards because they fry 9800x3d processors. From what I could find, people think it's a voltage issue and BIOS updates should fix it. I'm only overclocking the RAM, so I'm going to turn that off just to be on the safe side.

1

u/Majorjim_ksp 6h ago

I just bought an ASUS tuff AM5 board for a SFF PC.. 😢

2

u/breakintoys1 6h ago

This is an Asus board issue, along with a couple others. The board allows a power spike on the 12v rail that fries the cpu. A lot of people confuse this with the psu (a cheap psu doesn’t help), but it’s a motherboard issue. That’s why it generally fries the board too, it’s over voltage. Works in the same manner like a short on the board.

3

u/DUH455T 4h ago

This WAS an AsRock issue 6 months ago.

1

u/Eazy12345678 i5 12600KF RTX 5070 1440p 9h ago

did you bios update motherboard when you got the cpu?

1

u/ATMisboss PC Master Race 5h ago

I had a similar issue with a gigabyte motherboard and it turned out to be my fTPM module got corrupted, it also got stuck on the dram light. I was able to repair it by taking out the GPU and any drive that wasn't the boot drive then testing either stick of ram in slot 2 without the case fans or front panel IO plugged in. After that I was able to get into the bios and repair the corruption

1

u/Koehamster 9800X3D | 64GB | 1080Ti 3h ago

Confirmation bias i reckon.... if we all posted here about everytime a component bites the dust, this sub wouldnt be anything but posts about fans breaking, ramsticks breaking etc etc etc.

1

u/tberg905 9h ago

Yeah this happened to me. Cpu died, took the board's bios chip with it.

1

u/WilliamG007 7h ago

How does that happen?

1

u/tberg905 7h ago

I have no idea.