Ryzen Overclockers Beware

[Thinkfreely]

Wanted to share a recent experience for all us new Ryzen users (And those who are thinking of Ryzen) So I have had my Ryzen build for about 40 days now and have been very happy with it.

 

I have been having a great time being able to game, and content create, or game while streaming (made vids on all 3) and I think its a great value.

 

I am a avid overclocker and recently had an experience I wanted to share for those who are thinking of overclocking to be very careful while you do so with this new technology.

So recently I had to move my computer so I had to unplug everything, when I went to re-plug the computer I got a boot error code. After doing about 12 trouble shooting steps and contacting the manufacturer (Asus ROG Crosshair Hero 6 AM4 motherboard) I ended up having to RMA my board, and currently am using my Skylake I had before I built my Ryzen PC.

 

So after checking the webs I basically found out what happened and this is not unique to that board. Basically I had my CPU and RAM overclocked, well when I move things, just to be safe I set them to factory clock before unplugging anything on the Motherboard (As my motherboard supplies constant voltage even when off.

 

Well apparently that didn't take because when I turned on my pc the voltage to the DIMM sockets still thought it was overclocked, and had a huge spike in voltage which bricked the board. There has been in 45 days 4 bios updates for that board specifically as before the first bios update users where getting static voltage of as high as 1.7-1.8 on the CPU and 1.5-1.6 on the Ram! That was without doing any kind of overclocking. And its not just the Crosshair hero, there has been reports with MSI, and Asrock boards as well. There is a video that Jayztwocents does on this exact issue where when the motherboard first gets turned on it gets "slapped" with volts to wake up so to speak, and even though I had it set to default, it basically went right to my overclock voltage + how ever much extra when it first turned on bricking the board.

 

The last bios for the board supposedly "fixed" this issue, but I hadn't downloaded it so no way to tell.

 

But just a heads up to those buying Ryzen, this is still new tech. I don't regret my decision to buy, but if your not updating you Bios/Chipset then there is a good chance you can go through the same thing I did if you overclock as there are voltage problems with a lot of the boards, and make sure that if you unplug the PC your first setting your clocks and voltages back to default, otherwise you could get "volt slapped" like I did and fry the board. Happy overclocking!

[Evanair]

C6H has two voltage settings for RAM. Boot voltage and normal voltage.

 

Sounds like either user error in forgetting to address this change or an error during booting. 

[He_162]

I have never had this issue on an MSI Board, but I have always had this issue on every AsRock board I bought including the following:

AsRock AB350m-HDV
AsRock Z97 / Z170 / 270 Pro4 (all of them)

All of those boards had this issue, and none of my MSI boards have, and I've had the following MSI boards:
MSI B350m Mortar Arctic

MSI H87M-E34
MSI Z270A-Pro

I have not seen this issue even on the original bios that came with any of these motherboards, and it was not occurring on some of the original bios's of the AsRock boards as well, not to mention some of my AsRock boards failed to reset when I reset them in the bios, and ran my overclock settings anyway.

 

[He_162]

1 minute ago, Evanair said:

C6H has two voltage settings for RAM. Boot voltage and normal voltage.

 

Sounds like either user error in forgetting to address this change or an error during booting. 

It has used the "boot voltage" on my motherboard despite that being turned off in my AsRock AB350m-HDV.

[Thinkfreely]

21 hours ago, Evanair said:

C6H has two voltage settings for RAM. Boot voltage and normal voltage.

 

Sounds like either user error in forgetting to address this change or an error during booting. 

It's a bios issue related to overclocking as stated, board jams too much voltage on boot.

[Thinkfreely]

21 hours ago, He_162 said:

I have never had this issue on an MSI Board, but I have always had this issue on every AsRock board I bought including the following:

AsRock AB350m-HDV
AsRock Z97 / Z170 / 270 Pro4 (all of them)

All of those boards had this issue, and none of my MSI boards have, and I've had the following MSI boards:
MSI B350m Mortar Arctic

MSI H87M-E34
MSI Z270A-Pro

I have not seen this issue even on the original bios that came with any of these motherboards, and it was not occurring on some of the original bios's of the AsRock boards as well, not to mention some of my AsRock boards failed to reset when I reset them in the bios, and ran my overclock settings anyway.

 

Very lucky, glad you didn't have to deal with it.