keep using old BIOS or update to 3.25

Hello from Japan.

Like most of you, I've been following these messy events that surround ASRock motherboards frying Ryzen CPUs (specially the X3D) at an alarming rate.

I've own an ASRock B650M Pro RS WiFi with a Ryzen 7 9800X3D, 64GB of DDR5 5600 CL46 RAM (Crucial PRO), RTX5080, 3 X NVMe, Fractal Design Ion+ 2 Platinum 860W...

Bought it 2 months ago and all is running fine. No OC on CPU, RAM or GPU. Use it for gaming 5 to 6 hours a week. The BIOS came with 3.10.

Now, the thing is, should I leave it as is or should I update the BIOS to 3.25? ASRock recommends to update to the latest BIOS but ASRock Japan suggested to not update the BIOS if there is no problem with the PC. But what if the motherboard is degrading the CPU? If no steps are taken, it might stop working in a near future. There's no way to know if this is happening, unfortunately.

There are a few cases of dead Ryzen CPUs with the latest 3.25 BIOS update installed already so what do you guys suggest? This is like playing the Russian roulette! It's ridiculous!! I'm even thinking of selling the MB and get another brand altogether. Don't feel like risking the 9800X3D and maybe other component of my PC.

Hi NDRE28.

Yes, I already watched Steve's video interview. Probably the smartest thing to do is to update to 3.25 with the hope of stopping the CPU degradation (if in fact it's happening) but what bothers me is that there are still people reporting dead CPUs with the latest BIOS version.

Something tells me these guys are still clueless as to what is causing all this mess!

I went ahead and updated the BIOS to 3.25. You guys are right. I guess there's no harm at this point.

Are there reports of decrease in performance after the update? I run a few benchmarks and found no difference from before. Maybe a bit higher CPU temp.

Do you guys change the DRAM profile setting to EXPO? It is on Auto now (whatever that means). My RAM is not that great so not sure if there will be an impact at all.

In my case (B850M-X, 9800X3D), I had to force FCLK (to 2GHz) and UCLK ratio (to 1:1 against MemClk at 2800MHz). Otherwise nothing special.

My RAM is 100% JEDEC spec (ECC UDIMMs), so they have no XMP/EXPO profiles. LOL

I don't trust various "saving" features, especially across different BIOS versions, so I go through important ones and make a physical notes of them, so I can go back to the settings I want.

I generally don't need to change all that many settings from the default, so it's not that big of a deal. The biggest mess is the fan % setting values. LOL