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Like Intel before it, AMD blames motherboard makers for burnt-out CPUs

arstechnica.com

71–80 of 91 posts

Re: Like Intel before it, AMD blames motherboard makers for burnt-out CPUs

#71
post #33

Not a huge fan of that headline. It's completely plausible that motherboard vendors aren't following AMD's guidance and push the chips past their documented limits. It wouldn't be the first time, and it won't be the last. The problem with Intel blaming 13th and 14th gen failures on motherboard manufacturers was that it happened even on motherboards which followed Intel's guidance to a T. This Ars Technica article doe…

Ars Technica is far from what it once was. It's now more political and leaning heavy on click bait.

Re: Like Intel before it, AMD blames motherboard makers for burnt-out CPUs

#72
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, sure. They’re not going to fly someone out to fix a retail customer’s monitor. I get that and would never expect that level of service. And yet, they doubled down hard on refusing to replace my defective 6 month old, still under warranty, screen. Amazon was the hero in this story. They listened to my story and gave me a refund, which I spent with a different brand. It felt wonderful explaining to their enterprise…

Ah yes. I've also had the joy of telling off a professional account manager because of piss-poor consumer support (in my case, it was DHL). It's a great feeling :)

The opportunity is rare, but wow, was that ever satisfying.

Re: Like Intel before it, AMD blames motherboard makers for burnt-out CPUs

#73

I started seeing this more than a week ago on r/ASRock. There was a BIOS update and loads and loads of people reported that their CPUs fried.

Call me paranoid, but I never update the BIOS unless I have no other option. I have seen way too many examples of things going wrong. Although, that was many moons ago, and perhaps with the reset switches and stuff these days things are not as bad as they once were.

Regardless, if ain't broken, don't break it.

Re: Like Intel before it, AMD blames motherboard makers for burnt-out CPUs

#74
Having worked with a MOBO manufacturer, I would say that this is somewhat plausible though not necessarily the fault of the engineers. In my experience, both users and company administration, e.g. sales, CEOs have a lot to do with failures. An example, users are used to a particular MOBO brand, they want to try the new gadget-a video card usually, which requires much more power than the recommended power supply. They call tech support asking for an opinion, tech support talks to sales, sales will want to make the, well, sale. They typically did not ask the engineers for an opinion, as they are overseas, and instead query a direct manager, who will typically test the compatibility of the device and for a few days. When the device passes the test, they relate the good news to the sales department, who will then contact the user with the good news, an offer of a complete system. The user buys the system with the new video card, takes it for a ride. Three months later the user calls in reporting heating issues, tech support walks the user through some test, the user typically provides the results, tech support does not have an answer for the issue, they ask the user to send the unit in for testing and repair. Unit comes into the shop, board gets replaced, tested for three more days, passes all tests, gets shipped back to the user and issue pops up again, user gets irate, threatens to sue, nothing gets fixed. All because the bottom line is the $3000 dollars that was made in the sale. The issue eventually gets sent up the chain to engineers, they provide a BIOS fix, given to the user, user flashes. Issue is fixed, two years later, new Video Card comes in, user decides he needs that vid card, the never-ending cycle continues anew. I remember an instance where machines from a former employer was touted as a small low-heat server, really tiny, machine was made with substandard components, basically, cost-cutting at its best. Machines overheated, CPUs damaged, real shit show.

So yes, MOBO manufacturers, users bare equal responsibility, a chance to make lots of money & commission from the former, the need to be the first to try cutting edge technology without regards for proper safety, limitations and hardware compatibility, from the latter.

It seems that over the decades, people have failed to learn or neglected, Moore's Law's increasing physical limitations, because hey why not ;)

Re: Like Intel before it, AMD blames motherboard makers for burnt-out CPUs

#75
post #47
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you a business account with Dell? Roughly how much does your company spend with them per year? Without knowing that, we can't put your anecdote in context.

No it's just Dell extended warranty. They call it "Dell Care Plus". Just try to buy a desktop machine and you'll see it as an option. An example: https://i.imgur.com/sSVnfjb.png The important part: "On-location repairs, by Dell certified technicians, after remote diagnosis (1-2 business days)". There's no special business contract or paperwork involved. And you can get it for free in promos. Like it did.

Yeah I know about their extended warranty; then their responsiveness is obviously due to the extended warranty, not any comparative admission of liability.

As to "Dell support has flown a repair guy to my place with spare hardware pieces ". You don't know that he wasn't already planning to fly to your area for 5+ other customers anyway. Also it's a less impressive story if you live in a heavily tech area than if you live in the Ozarks. Flights can often be cheaper than driving, and the rep has less dead/travel time and can service other customers or whatever.

I looked at Dell extended warranties before (can be ~about as expensive as the machine itself, over 3yrs) and figured that if you're buying with your own money, you can do better with due diligence on which specific year-models are/aren't reliable and what each component costs to replace, also couple that with a selective backup strategy. As long as you're not too remote.

Re: Like Intel before it, AMD blames motherboard makers for burnt-out CPUs

#76

Well, seeing how buggy motherboards are in general, I rather believe AMD when they say they're ignoring yet another crucial detail. My previous Gigabyte motherboard had unstable TSC, incorrect IOMMU configuration, broken PSP and CPPC. My current Asus board also has C-state weirdness and broken ASPM and it killed one CPU(!) on default settings. I won't even go into all the bugs I've encountered with Lenovo laptops, AC…

I would hate life if I had to debug those. The idea that there’s an entire market segment of people who tolerate such instability or even relish the task of debugging unreliable hardware boggles my mind.

Re: Like Intel before it, AMD blames motherboard makers for burnt-out CPUs

#77
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If something breaks it's 100% their fault that they need to make right "You're holding it wrong", Steve Jobs to a customer that covered their invisible antenna.

Most other brands had very similar problems (including my trusty Nokia at the time). You can still attenuate antennae on modern phones if you hold it just right. It's just a matter of physics. Here is what Nokia N97 does when you "hold it wrong": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shR4jITiG48

That's not as bad as Apple's.

https://archive.is/20240401152946/https://www.wired.com/2010...

Re: Like Intel before it, AMD blames motherboard makers for burnt-out CPUs

#78
post #75
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's just Dell extended warranty. They call it "Dell Care Plus". Just try to buy a desktop machine and you'll see it as an option. An example: https://i.imgur.com/sSVnfjb.png The important part: "On-location repairs, by Dell certified technicians, after remote diagnosis (1-2 business days)". There's no special business contract or paperwork involved. And you can get it for free in promos. Like it did.

Yeah I know about their extended warranty; then their responsiveness is obviously due to the extended warranty, not any comparative admission of liability. As to "Dell support has flown a repair guy to my place with spare hardware pieces " . You don't know that he wasn't already planning to fly to your area for 5+ other customers anyway. Also it's a less impressive story if you live in a heavily tech area than if you…

> As to "Dell support has flown a repair guy to my place with spare hardware pieces ". You don't know that he wasn't already planning to fly to your area for 5+ other customers anyway.

I can tell you that wasn't the case because it was a small town that had a small airport. And they sent the guy next-day from my report. He told me he just flew for my issue and was returning on the same day.

If it was some large city or capital, they probably wouldn't have needed to fly the tech guy anyway. Someone would have probably been available nearby.

As for the price, perhaps it changes for different hardware, but for customer PCs you can see for yourself, it's around ~$45 per year. Which was free for me because of promo.

Re: Like Intel before it, AMD blames motherboard makers for burnt-out CPUs

#79
post #9

Anecdotally, ASRock has been blamed also by Intel for shipping motherboards with NIC debug settings on: https://community.intel.com/t5/Ethernet-Products/1-out-of-2-...

The fact that the vast majority of these burnouts are on ASRock is a pretty big smoking gun to me. They're an attractive manufacturer because they're cheap, but at what cost?

Ive always liked asrock because they had a lot of control in the bios

Re: Like Intel before it, AMD blames motherboard makers for burnt-out CPUs

#80
post #9

Anecdotally, ASRock has been blamed also by Intel for shipping motherboards with NIC debug settings on: https://community.intel.com/t5/Ethernet-Products/1-out-of-2-...

The fact that the vast majority of these burnouts are on ASRock is a pretty big smoking gun to me. They're an attractive manufacturer because they're cheap, but at what cost?

My Ryzen recently died on Gigabyte.
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