Even if you're a professional overclocking YouTuber, it seems it might be surprisingly easy to brick one of AMD's best gaming CPUs: with a little tweaking to a voltage above 1.35V, the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D (open in new tab) is one Less.

Roman Hartung, aka der8auer, recently visited Taiwan to visit Asus' test lab. There he decided to test some CPUs, and as it turns out, even enthusiast-grade CPUs like the latest X3D chips don't change the old saying: "The old saying goes.

Indeed, with AMD's top-of-the-line gaming chips, it seems that it really really shouldn't.

One of the great things about AMD's Ryzen 7000 series CPUs (opens in new tab) is that they are now very easy to overclock in Windows using PBO 2 and Curve Optimizer. However, the option to overclock the chip in the BIOS still remains and you may see an option to raise the voltage to 2.5V. Eek.

So Hartung set about raising the voltage on the Ryzen 9 7950X3D that Asus had loaned him, along with other tests. To his dismay, everything did not go as planned (opens in new tab) (via HardwareLuxx (opens in new tab)).

He first tested the voltage up to 1.35V. Then he had to run and get a liquid nitrogen cooler to keep it between 85°C and 90°C, but Hartung still decided to push things further.

He saw the danger and did it anyway.

The moment the CPU hit 1.5V, everything went out the window. The motherboard displayed a 00 error code and despite his best efforts, sadly there seemed to be nothing he could do to save the CPU.

Even before the CPU was under load, it was clear that the Ryzen 9 7950X3D was broken, although Hartung himself admits that it may have just been bad luck, as extreme testing of AMD's new super high-end Ryzen family has not been done much, HardwareLuxx warned users in case anyone tries to boost the voltage just because they have the option.

He spoke to both AMD and Asus and was told that the chips are not intended to operate at such high VCore ratings. He also said that "Asus will probably limit the maximum manual voltage to 1.35V," and this will probably be done via a BIOS update.

During this trip, Hartung also had the opportunity to check out the $6,000 Intel Xeon W9 3495X chip. we already reported that der8auer showed off a 56-core Intel chip at 4.2GHz stock speed at home (open in new tab), but he was confident that he could push it further in the Asus lab.

"Actually, I thought 4.4GHz or 4.5GHz would be totally easy, but it wasn't," Hartung says of the Sapphire Rapids CPU (machine translation). Nevertheless, he managed to exceed 4.7 GHz on all 56 cores, despite a few crashes due to input voltage issues in Cinebench R23. This translates to about 114,000 points, which really shows the capability of the CPU for enthusiasts when combined with the AIO water cooler.

With the liquid nitrogen cooling solution, Hartung was able to bring the CPU up to 2.5GHz and achieve an astounding new record of 125,000 points on Cinebench R23.

Red-team enthusiasts may be disappointed that the CPU voltage cannot be raised to such heights, but at least they can rest assured that the BIOS has been updated and the fork will likely never exceed 1.35V. No one wants to find out that they inadvertently destroyed a monster CPU by floating overvoltage.

Only you can prevent a CPU fire.