EXPOsing The Cause
The stories of self destructing Ryzen 7000 chips, both the Ryzen 7000X3D and standard models, has been verified and AMD has responded. The good news is that anyone who has encountered this is officially urged to contact AMD support, which suggests that you will be able to get a replacement if your chip did die from excessive voltages. You may still need to reach out to your motherboard vendor as well, if the chip deformed enough to damage the pins in the ZIF socket but it is likely they too will be supportive.
The exact cause seems to be as was originally theorized, excessive SoC voltages are causing electrical and thermal damage to the chips, releasing the magic smoke and turning them back into sand. There are a number of ways this can occur, and not all of them involve manual overclocking. In some cases it is the automatic overclocking applied by AMD’s EXPO which can feed unsafe voltages, hence AMD’s quick willingness to make things right.
There will be new BIOS updates from motherboard vendors to ensure this stops happening, and AMD are also looking at ways to prevent anyone to . If you are running a Ryzen 7000 system you should probably disable EXPO and any overclocking you applied for now, and use software or the BIOS to monitor your SoC voltages. We expect a fix from AMD to ensure that the voltage limits cannot be circumvented, be warned this means you might not get the same level of overclock you have now once you install the fix.
