author: Adrian Piotrowski
PowerGPU: AMD Ryzen 5000 Series Highly Unreliable
PC building company PowerGPU tweeted stat figures showing that the failure rate of AMD's latest CPUs can reach almost 20 percent. The tweet has now been deleted, but not before it made big waves on the web.
In a nutshell
- PowerGPU, a PC building company, found that almost 20% of the Ryzen 9 5950X processors they received had manufacturing defects;
- The same problem, but on a smaller scale, is said to affect the rest of the Zen 3 series CPUs and motherboards from the same company;
- The original tweet has already been deleted, but there is still a discussion about the validity of the allegations.
The PC building website a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://www.powergpu.com/">PowerGPU, reported disturbing stats on its Twitter account. It shows that out of 50 AMD Ryzen 9 5950X CPUs sent to their company, as many as eight had manufacturing defects that prevented the unit from operating properly. The problem affected the other Zen 3 series CPUs, but it wasn't as severe as with the most powerful Ryzen 9. In comparison, according to the website's creators, they've only received one defective Intel CPU in the last two years. Today in the wee hours of the morning, the tweet with this information was deleted by the authors.
As it turned out, AMD processors weren't the only ones to turn out to be unusually flawed. PowerGPU claims that every week at least 3-5 AMD motherboards based on the new 500 chipset they received were inoperable.
Reactions to the reported revelations were mixed. Some argue that the author of the original tweet was simply unlucky and his examples should be treated as anecdotal evidence only. One user submitted data from Germany's largest computer store Mindfactory. They show that for most new AMD processors the complaint rate is around 0.5 percent.
Another Internet user, the well-known Korean insider harukaze5719, citing the words of another PC building company, claims that the sample is too small to come to any conclusions, although he notes that recently there have been topics reporting problems with CPUs running on B550 or X570 chipsets.
Recent months have been very successful for AMD. In January, the company reported that the past year was very good in terms of financial results. In addition, reviews of the Zen 3 series processors were very positive. Will the above information turn out to be a storm in a teacup, or is AMD really having a problem with component reliability?