AMD says overclocking blows a hidden fuse on Ryzen Threadripper 7000 to show if you've overclocked the chip, but it doesn't automatically void your CPU's warranty

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AMD says overclocking blows a hidden fuse on Ryzen Threadripper 7000 to show if you've overclocked the chip, but it doesn't automatically void your CPU's warranty
tomshardware.com

AMD says overclocking blows a hidden fuse on Ryzen Threadripper 7000 to show if you've overclocked the chip, but it doesn't automatically void your CPU's warranty::AMD explains the hidden fuses behind Ryzen Threadripper 7000 processors and how it will handle warranty claims.

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That's a bit shitty but hopefully they don't just use it as a trap to deny any warranty coverage on an overclocked CPU.

Meanwhile Intel will void your warranty if you've enabled XMP. I don't know if they have a way of telling if you did so or not but they will try to trick you into admitting it when you're asking for an RMA.

Reviewers really should say "ok, well if it's not covered by warranty then we'll just do CPU benchmarks at the minimum JDEC speeds, as the manufacturer recommends"

Any good reviewer should already be doing a typical non-OC’d benchmark and an OC’d benchmark anyway.

The majority of people don’t overclock so would only care about the stock performance anyway. And overclockers should recognize that if you damage the chip by pushing it too far, it shouldn’t be covered.

Most people don't consider enabling the advertised memory clock speeds as an overclock.

We aren't talking about taking your CPU and overclocking it. We're talking about a simple UEFI checkbox that everyone is told to do.

Who the fuck is “we” here? Because the article is about CPU overlocking. I don’t give a fuck about the parent comments offhand comment about Intel. Intel is irrelevant here.

Your comment I replied to was about reviewer CPU benchmarks.

Who the fuck is we is literally the entire industry. Intel, AMD, every reviewer I have ever seen. Everyone.

Seriously, look at ANY review. They're all done with XMP or DOCP profiles set, just as the CPU manufacturer, motherboard manufacturer, and memory manufacturer recommends.

I don't give a fuck about what your offhand opinions are, I'm taking a out the reality. And the reality is that everyone is told to enable XMP.

Your comment I replied to was about reviewer CPU benchmarks.

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You know memory speed impacts CPU performance right?

Enabling XMP isn’t overclocking the CPU. It wouldn’t blow this fuse.

So have you just abandoned what you said above, or are you just ignoring it?

AMD doesn't consider it CPU overclocking, no. Intel does. That's what I was replying to, as you very well know.

Meanwhile Intel will void your warranty if you've enabled XMP.

Intel is not in the article. Literally nothing about this post is about Intel other than an offhand remark about XMP.

The article is about AMD CPUs. I could not give a flying fuck about Intel.

I'm replying to the comment. In case you haven't noticed this is a public discussion, and when talking about AMD CPUs, it's common to bring up their only competitor, Intel CPUs.

If you didn't want to talk about intel CPUs, don't reply to a comment about intel CPUs. You inserted yourself into this discussion about Intel's practices then got angry that we were talking about Intel. Amazing.

It's a very reasonable thing to happen in a discussion. Do you know how those work? Talk about AMD leads to talk about Intel. It's not rocket science. You don't need to come in and start screaming that Intel is a forbidden topic.

Seems to me like you're just grasping for something after I dismissed your comment as nonsense.

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Well what we're talking about here is just memory speeds, not core overclocking. If you're building a computer and you're paying for RAM that is rated at a certain speed, you need to enable XMP to have it run at that speed. Since the memory controller is now integrated into CPUs, intel considers that overclocking so it voids your warranty. I think most people who are buying CPUs to build their own PCs know this and will not run at base JEDEC speeds.

That's definitely not common knowledge for people who build their own PC.

It definitely is.

Every single review and YouTube video, even from channels with broad appeal like LTT and the like always talk about the need to enable XMP and talk about it having to be enabled to get the advertised performance.

It gets advertised on memory kits and motherboards and they provide easy instructions on how to do it.

It's common knowledge to enable it.

Eh, yeah maybe you're right but it's such a tremendous amount of performance to lose out on for a couple keystrokes. Any halfway decent guide for beginners should be mentioning it but I don't know how people outside my circles build computers. Do they read/watch guides? Do they just plug shit together and pray that it works? 🤷‍♀️

It's very prominent in any build guide, on even casual PC youtuber videos, in motherboard manuals, on ram kits.

It's absolutely common knowledge to enable XMP, I dunno what that guy is smoking.

There is literally nothing in the article about memory speeds

It’s entirely about overlocking the CPU .

The only thing about memory is your offhand comment about Intel and XMP which is entirely irrelevant to the article.

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Hah yeah actually, that should become the standard for Intel CPU reviews.

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It's not shitty, it's fair. If damage is caused by the overclock why should the manufacturer foot the bill? You modified the product to run outside the specs!

The "shitty" part of it is it's a binary one time feedback. If the fuse blows that's it. It doesn't matter if the CPU failed for something else the fuse can't unblow. I don't know what type of fuse they're using, would it blow with any level of over clocking, or with an extreme amount, is it a time delayed fuse that requires a bunch of time over clocked or is it instant? If i want to over clock just a bit but test it at a higher clock rate before setting my desired speed will that blow the fuse? The only point of the fuse is to determine if the user "missused" their cpu at any point.

It's probably a collection of fuses instead of just a single one. One for xmp, one for each of the pbo options, various ones for manual OCs. I'd guess there's tiers of how aggressive the OC is, maybe a counter for how many times it was booted with that OC enabled.

I wonder how much extra cost that would add to CPU production. There's probably some cost benefit analysis looking at the saving from denying warranties to the cost of extra components on the chip.

I think they'd scale well so it wouldn't have that big of an impact. Like it could be one set of fuses for the entire chip. Even a KB of those fuses wouldn't take up much area on modern chips. That's if they are detecting settings or overall chip power.

If they are detecting OC damage to circuitry, that might involve a lot more fuses throughout the chip along with circuitry to read them (or at least detect their state), which could be more involved. Though there is already circuitry to test the functionality of the chip at a fine level for binning and QC, and it might be trivial to add some fuses to that.

It's a bit shitty because we then have to trust that they won't use this as an excuse to void the warranty on chips that had a fatal defect to begin with. Overclocking is pretty safe unless you're doing extreme overclocking and they won't say how they determine if a failure was caused by an overclock or not.

It's definitely "more fair" for AMD than Intel to do it since they don't charge a premium for unlocked processors but I still don't like it. They developed PBO, it's a feature included with the CPU I bought, I want to be able to use it without fear of losing my warranty, but even just enabling that will trip that fuse.

If they start selling new ones with the proper terms of sale ("overclocking voids warranty") then there's nothing wrong with that.

It would definitely be within their rights to do so.

Not in every market. That wouldn't fly in the EU. They'd only be able to deny warranty claims if they could prove that the overclock is what broke the chip

Dunno whether it's uniform all over the EU but in Germany the burden of proof shifts from the manufacturer to the consumer a year after sale, that is, if you want to rely on AMD having to prove that it was the overclock you better break the thing fast.

Probably not, it was just a way of saying that there is absolutely something wrong with that.

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