Yea buying a new PC this generation has been a pretty horrid experience for me. Paid $2500 CAD for my 4090 Strix only to stress for a month as to whether or not it will melt. Then paid $1600 for my AM5 platform only to stress over whether or not the CPU or Motherboard will melt or if the new BIOS updates will cuck the performance. I remember the days buying PC hardware wasn't such a minefield. If I didn't sell my 5950X to my friend so soon, I would have returned my AM5 upgrade but alas, I should have waited. I was like well it's been a month since the 7950X3D/7900X3D launched and 6 months since AM5 launched, what could possibly go wrong?

It's not like we have a lot of die shrinks left anyway. Might as well save nodes for later on while thinking ahead your business strategy.

Make every node shrink count.

The biggest problem from the AMD debacle is going to be for those who bought Zen 4 prior to the new BIOS updates. Especially those of who bought them at launch or even 3 months ago. According to Steve, the failure analysis lab is telling him that those who have been using Zen 4 CPUs all these months with higher voltages could be facing an unknown amount of damage and degradation already. So a higher quality chip could turn into a lower quality chip. Remember that higher quality voltages would happen just by turning on Expo. I'd avoid used Zen 4 chips like the plague.

I mean, they aren't going for a recall or even a public warning to update the BIOS and just replace instead as they come, so the problem must be not too great. That being said, selling mobos with pre-launch BIOS looks kind of bad on Asus.

Well either that or they are choosing the cheapest way to resolve the problem which is what I am more inclined to believe. It would cost a lot of money for AMD and their board partners to do a formal recall worldwide so RMAing the CPUs that die is much cheaper. Plus if a CPU performs 5-10% worse today than it did 5 months ago, that could be considered as user problem and not a reason for RMA. Honestly the resale value is probably gonna be horrid after all this finishes, least for vanilla zen 4.

My biggest takes from the GN news video are that Asus has been the top brand in motherboards for too long, and that's starting to show in their products and how they react. Safety systems not working, dangerously high voltages to ensure EXPO profiles work (it wouldn't surprise me if their XMP profiles in Intel boards are also higher than the competition) and now also pre-production BIOS? Really? There's no excuse for that.

Now, I understand that a full recall might be unreasonable, but their mild and mostly passive reaction to the whole problem is as far from the appropiate response as possible.

On another note, the comment about board partners expecting a sub $500 price point for the upcoming AMD GPUs is worrying. I know that the video may have been fillmed in Monday, and since then we've had newer rumors about it, but there's no f*cking way AMD will price the 7600 that high. That's a product that needs to be less than $400 to even have a change to sell some units.

And if he's talking about the 7700, the more of the same. We're seeing how the market reacts to overpriced products these days, and that price won't convince anyone to buy them.

Yea Asus certainly needs to do better. The irony is that all the safety systems are there in place, just the way they configured them made it so none of them actually worked. But I don't think it will affect them all that much in the long run as this isn't the first time Asus has had a cuckup and their brand has been largely unaffected mainly because their ecosystem of products as a brand is too strong.

And yea we will see what happens with GPU prices. At least AMD is pricing high on release and then discounting them when they don't sell. While Nvidia has barely discounted any of their products and instead has shifted allocation to their Prosumer/Datacenter GPUs instead as the demand for Ai continues to rise. Such a shame because Nvidia has so many excellent cutting edge features but it's hard to justify spending so much for 90% of the pc gamers out there.

Good morning guys. Here's something for some of you:

*** NEW CONTEST ***
Lexar ARES RGB DDR5 6000 MHz 32GB RAM Kit Giveaway [US And Canada Regions Only]
https://wccftech.com/lexar-ares-rgb-ddr5-6000-mhz-32gb-ram-kit-giveaway-us-and-canada-regions-only/
or https://gleam.io/LeCAL/lexar-ares-rgb-ddr5-giveaway

Specs:

• Lexar ARES RGB 32GB (2x16GB) DDR5 Desktop Memory (Gray) LD5FU016G-R6000GDGA
• Clock Speed: 6000 MHz
• Timing: CL34-38-38-76
• Lifetime limited product support
• Designed for the latest Intel XMP 3.0 and AMD EXPO

As the headline says, it's limited to US and Canada.

Good luck!

Nice! A shame I can't participate, I'd love to another 50% more RAM that the BIOS has to strangle so the system won't fry! :P