A Danish Redditor posted up a thread last night called “So this just happened” with a picture of his scorched Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor. You can clearly see the heat damage to the bottom of the CPU; some of the landings have come off of the chip and melded with the LGA socket. The user says he simply “watching some [TV] series” when his machine shut off.
The user, known as /u/t0pli, had his shiny new Ryzen CPU installed in a fancy ASRock X870E Nova motherboard (which we reviewed, by the way.) He said that he was not overclocking aside from enabling the EXPO profile on his RAM. He also says that his motherboard was updated to the latest BIOS at the time of building, and that he’s an experienced PC builder who was monitoring his new system’s temperatures with HWMonitor and didn’t see anything untoward.
After the machine shut off and would not power on again, he tried replacing the power supply with another unit to no avail. Finally, he disassembled the whole machine and found the scorched CPU and socket.
Obviously, this recalls a similar incident in November of last year. However, the user in that situation admitted that he forced the CPU into his MSI motherboard’s LGA socket, damaging the socket in the process. In this case, there’s no obvious problem or fault of the builder, as the machine apparently ran fine for some 20 days since construction.
We could speculate for days about what caused this failure, but ultimately /u/t0pli just wants to get his system working again, and to that end he’s already RMA’d the CPU while waiting on a similar authorization for his motherboard. It’s impossible to say what went wrong, but as a Redditor in the thread points out, “this is complex hardware, produced and sold relatively cheaply. Some units will fail.” Wise words from the PC Master Race.