The chipmaker's David McAfee and Travis Kirsch told Quasarzone that some ODM BIOSes aren’t playing by AMD’s official rules. The board makers have been tweaking voltage and power settings beyond what AMD recommends, resulting in crispy CPUs and, in some cases, physically charred sockets.

According to Tom's Hardware, the main target appears to be ASRock, which has been the subject of repeated Reddit complaints, particularly from users running the Ryzen 7 9800X3D. Reports were so frequent that ASRock's moderators set up a megathread to track the chaos.

ASRock initially blamed memory compatibility issues and pushed out several BIOS updates in a desperate attempt to get things under control. Its latest update, version 3.25 from late May, fiddled with PBO settings including EDC, TDC, and mysterious "shadow" voltages to curb the fires.

AMD has since confirmed that some board partners are pushing CPUs past their intended specs, even subtly, via UEFI BIOS tweaks. While this sort of behaviour isn’t unique, even Chipzilla’s motherboard partners have been known to dabble, AMD’s tone suggests that things may be going a bit too far.

McAfee and Kirsch claim the issue is more complex than just overtuning and that AMD is working closely with partners to sort it. Still, AMD strongly recommends users update their BIOS to the latest version, which is as close to shouting "put out the fire" as you're likely to get.

For now, the number of incidents seems to have dropped following ASRock’s latest fix, but disgruntled users on Reddit say the smoke hasn't entirely cleared. AM5 may have more heat left in this story than AMD would like.