“We are aware of a limited number of user reports involving ASRock AM5 motherboards failing to complete POST. Following a joint investigation, AMD and ASRock identified a memory compatibility issue present in earlier BIOS versions, which has been rectified in the latest BIOS," AMD said in a statement.

AMD told  PCGamer "It’s worth noting that a failure to POST can be caused by a range of factors and does not necessarily indicate a non-functional CPU. We recommend users start by updating their BIOS to the latest version available for their specific motherboard model."

The trouble is, that’s not even close to the whole picture. While AMD and ASRock tout BIOS updates as miracle cures, user reports suggest otherwise. A thread on the ASRock subreddit has now tracked 108 separate cases—some bricked before updates, others after.

Worse still, some 9800X3Ds have straight-up fried themselves: burn marks, melted sockets, and silicon toast. One poor sod reported their CPU dying in hours; another made it months before their chip cooked itself into oblivion and served itself up in a white wine sauce of despair.

It insists the problem is fixed for those who update their BIOS and has offered RMA options for anyone still stuck. But that hardly patches up AMD's reputational crater, which it now shares with Chipzilla, which bumbled through a similar mess with its unstable 13th—and 14th-gen CPUs.

And to spice things up, there’s at least one report of a dead Ryzen 9 9950X3D—hinting this might not be isolated to the 9800X3D after all.