A bricked B650M pg-riptide

A little story here.

I bought asrock B650M pg-riptide AM5 Mircro-ATX mobo in Dec 2022. it is paired with AMD Ryzen 5600x and two 16G G.Skill F5-5600J3636C16G RAM. At the very beginning. the system was not stable and memtest86 showed some memory errors with 1 bank of memory. I exchanged the RAM and tested 2 ram again with memtest86 for 3~4 hours. no error was detected.

However the problem with this mobo just started. My system(Windows 10) was stable for most of time but randomly ran into blue screen for couples times in span of 6 months. there is no specific pattern and most time I just browse web or remote to another machine. The running time is long(more than 8 hours per day). The frequency of incidents is small and memtest86 can't detect any error with a few hour testing. The version of bios must be 3.11. All other versons would result memory error. Also EXPO 5600 must be enabled, the default speed of 4800 result in memory error.

I can't determine whether the problem is at mobo, memory or CPU, and have no other spare part to replace and test it. I decided to take out one bank of memory and only use single 16G Ram. Bluescreen happen less frequently but still happen, may be 1 or twice in 6 months.

I kept trying new version of bios when Asrock release one. However all new version of bios didn't just make memory error worse. The tip point come to version 4.10, which claim "Optimized Memory Compatibility". After upgrading it the memory error is so bad that mobo stuck forever while restoring back to ver 3.11. basically, the mobo is bricked.

In the end, I replaced with a refurbished Asus TUF Gaming B650-E WIFI AM5 ATX mobo. It can stably run with the same 2 banks of RAM and CPU with different expo profile or overclocking setting.

If the asrock mobo completely can't stably work at all, I could RMA or just return it. However the rare random blue screen lets me keep trying and miss the warranty window. By no mean I am implying Asrock's product is statistically less stable than other brands. I just want to share my experience with the asrock mobo. Hope it is helpful for others.