Frankly, with the ball and chain that Intel has been dragging for the last few months on its latest generations, we all thought that AMD had given itself a totem of absolute immunity… But the launch of the Ryzen 9000 seems to be turning into a nightmare. A few hours ago, we spoke of our bewilderment at the disrupted launch and the questionable foot changes (notably in terms of TDP). But today we learn that other clouds are gathering. A number of testers are reporting problems, instabilities and, once again, deformations on certain Ryzen 9000 processors after repeated assembly/disassembly. It’s a kind of deformation on the lower part of the processor, at the level of the pins, which obviously causes problems or even a total malfunction of the processor.
Ryzen 9000: bad karma
Most of the problems can be summed up as follows: instabilities at best, crashes in certain benchmarks or, at worst, a processor that stops working for good. We’re therefore dealing with the conjunction of two sources of problems. A software problem, for which rumors seem to indicate that AMD is rapidly preparing a solution… But also a hardware problem with processors that warp, as we have seen, albeit in a very limited way, with certain Ryzen 7000s.
Software and “physical” problems?
The latest jolt is the analysis produced by Gamer Nexus, which finds that AMD’s latest processors offer uneven performance, especially when it comes to gaming. Although the 9700X performs well in multi-core rendering, it doesn’t perform as well in games, leading the hairy youtuber to remove it from recommendations for gaming-centric users. Inconsistencies that we, too, have noted and reported publicly. The same applies to the 9600X: despite its initial good performance, it suffers from compatibility problems similar to those of the 9700X. These compatibility difficulties were not present in the previous series, the Ryzen 7000, which underlines the calamitous launch of the 9000X series. Under these conditions, it’s hard not to call for caution, especially for users wishing to upgrade to Zen 5 for gaming use only.
As my grandmother used to say, “where there’s smoke, there’s fire”. The delay in the launch of the Ryzen 9000 and the rocky cause put forward to explain it were perhaps hiding something more serious. This generation was clearly not ready for release in the heat of August…