Question did i kill 2 different CPUs?

[ElFenix]

Have a computer* which was unstable. Random crashes with bluescreeens, that sort of thing. Didn't happen super regularly but it was annoying. Originally it was a 3600X on a B550 itx. Had a bunch of hand me down parts so that was wholesale swapped to a 3700X on a B450 board.

That was stable for months, but eventually started crashing. Often. Very often. Constant protected area or kernel or ntfs or nvidiasomething & etc. errors. Usually immediately after getting to the desktop if it would make it that far.

So I get to swapping. Obvious culprit was ram, so swapped that first. Nada. Often it was the graphics driver so fresh drivers and then swap the card. Uh-uh. Perhaps a short (and frankly swapping all this stuff is a pain in a case anyway) so out it goes onto a motherboard box. Fail. Think maybe windows has gotten corrupted so fresh install. Nope. Second power supply? Not likely. Third power supply? Definitely not. Different M.2 drive? Not that either. Switch to SATA?** No. Fresh linux install? Crashy-mc-crashface. Thinking there's nothing else left to change I acquire a new-to-me B550 motherboard. Didn't fix it.

Eventually I look up the CPU support list for that B450 board and my old 1700X works. Swap that. Stable. Rock solid stable.

So I think both those 3x00s CPUs are somewhat dead. I think the only real commonality is that both lived for some time in that B450 board, the 3600X went into the first B550 board and became unstable there. The 3700X was never in that B550 board, it went from my main gaming box to the B450 board when I upgraded.

All that crashing and memtest was rock solid for days any time I had the patience to leave it running that long.

Neither was intentionally overclocked or overvolted. The B450 board is a cheap ASUS Prime mATX which was gratis when I bought the 3600X. It was solid as can be running a 5900X at full tilt for a year and a half (I did put some small heatsinks on the VRMs which helped - it would throttle if there wasn't airflow right on them before).

Anyone know if this is a common thing with Zen2?






*I say computer but the only real commonality was where it sat at my desk.



**I may have far too many computer parts floating around.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Anyone know if this is a common thing with Zen2?

Common = no. But you are also not even close to the first person I've seen post about it happening to them. Both Greg Salazar and Bryan of TechYesCity have had a handful or so of bad Zen 2 and done content about it. I started using manual setting for Ryzen back in 2018? when I noticed my B450 boards were pumping 1.5v+ to the CPUs with OOB settings. Would not be at all surprised if accelerated degradation is responsible for the instability. Some posited in the past, it's due to bad batches; suppose that's possible too.

EDIT: You could try turning off PBO and see if they stabilize. If not, you could additionally set vcore manually to something high like 1.5v-1.525v and see if that gets them stable. If if does, then they are degraded.

My son is still using a 3700X as a daily driver on an AORUS ELITE B450, but if memory serves, I hand tuned it when giving it to him back then.

 

[Shmee]

Sounds like you did the testing and indeed your CPUs are unstable. One thing you could try, is updating the BIOS on your boards, if that has not been done already. But the good news is Zen 3 CPUs are even better performers, particularly in games, and they are pretty cheap.

 

[ElFenix]

my gaming computer is a 7800X3D on a gigabyte board that i'm not super fond of (every couple months the ethernet cable decides it's been unplugged all by itself and i have to actually unplug it and plug it back in, very strange), so that's not a an issue.