Another Ryzen 9000 CPU Burnout: What’s Really Going On?

Earlier this year, reports emerged of AMD Ryzen 9000 series failures on systems using Asrock motherboards, with AMD suggesting the root cause was likely noncompliance with official BIOS guidelines and the application of excessively high voltages.

A new case has now drawn attention after Torbjörn Granlund, the principal developer of the GMP library, reported that he has destroyed two Ryzen 9950X processors in the past several months during development work; in February 2025 one chip failed and by August a second had burned out under similar conditions.

Both failures showed localized scorching around the CPU pins, with damaged areas measuring roughly 25 square millimetres, and occurred under sustained full-load operation, pointing to intensive workloads as a factor. Granlund noted that ambient temperature was only 20°C at the time, making thermal environment unlikely, and he suspects repeated execution of compute-heavy MULX instructions.

He also observed that a Ryzen 7750X under nearly identical conditions remained stable, suggesting the fault may be unique to the Ryzen 9000 series, about which AMD has acknowledged the report but has not identified a root cause and does not consider excessive BIOS voltage a likely factor. According to the GMP library, for most everyday users this issue is unlikely to pose a threat.