Igor’s Lab has found a significant glitch within the MSI Heart Home windows app that permits AMD’s greatest CPU for gaming, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, to be overvolted and overclocked past its limits. At first look, this seems like a win for lovers and overclockers. Nonetheless, the appliance bypasses all synthetic voltage and clock velocity limitations altogether, turning this into an actual hazard for imprudent 5800X3D homeowners. To make issues worse, this difficulty was additionally found in Asus, Gigabyte, and ASRock software program, marking this as a platform-wide difficulty.
Igor of Igor’s Lab was in a position to show the hazard of this bug together with his personal 5800X3D. After overvolting the chip to 1.3v and past with MSI Heart, the 5800X3D reportedly died nearly instantly. We do not understand how the chip died particularly, however apparently Igor pushed the core voltage previous 1.3v after two handbook changes. The PC instantly shut down after the second voltage adjustment and by no means booted again up.
For the uninitiated, AMD’s Ryzen 7 5800X3D is the primary CPU to function AMD’s game-boosting 3D-VCache know-how. The tech provides a 64MB slab of L3 cache proper on prime of the Zen 3 die, boosting the chip’s L3 capability to 96MB. Nonetheless, this extra L3 cache severely impacts the CPU’s warmth dissipation, forcing the chip to function at decrease frequencies.
The issue is important sufficient that AMD beforehand blocked overclocking of the chip completely and decreased the utmost core voltage from 1.5v right down to 1.35v. AMD says the voltage restrictions are as a result of voltage limitations of the added cache, nevertheless, our testing signifies that the constraints nearly definitely have one thing to do with the chip’s warmth dissipation points.
To confirm Igor’s discovery, I went into MSI Heart on my private rig — that includes an MSI B450 Professional Carbon AC and Ryzen 7 5800X3D, and located the identical unlocked capabilities within the “Consumer Situation” sub-section. I discovered the handbook core voltage will be elevated as excessive as 1.55v, and the core multiplier is totally unlocked. I did not discover out what the multiplier restrict was, however I used to be in a position to enter a multiplier variety of 80 (for 8GHz).
In fact, I did not apply any of those settings as a result of I want to maintain utilizing my CPU. Nonetheless, primarily based on the actual fact I can enter these settings in any respect, with none limitations or greyed-out tabs does confirm this can be a massive drawback.
We now have no deadline for a doable repair, however we’re assured AMD will unravel this as quickly as doable — particularly since YouTuber Der8aur killed a 7950X3D whereas twiddling with related settings lower than two weeks in the past.
Whether or not the repair will are available in a brand new AGESA microcode replace, chipset replace, or software-side change is unclear. For now although, should you personal a Ryzen 7 5800X3D, simply be cautious when rummaging round your motherboard’s overclocking software program, and do not tweak any overclocking settings.
