Are Ryzen 5000 CPU failure rates as high as claimed?

Over the weekend, many websites reported on high failure rates for Ryzen 5000 series CPUs, citing a now-deleted Tweet from PowerGPU, who claimed that eight out of their 50 Ryzen 9 5950X CPUs were DOA (Dead On Arrival) and that the same was true for four out of their 50 Ryzen 9 5900X processors. 

While defective units should be expected from almost all products, PowerGPU’s data showcased worryingly high failure rates. However, it is worth remembering that this claim was unsubstantiated, from a single source, and that is all traced back to a single, now-deleted, Tweet. 

In another tweet, PowerGPU claimed that out of 320 CPUs, they had “6% die“. This would be a damning claim if this held true for other major system builders, so we contacted our friends within the industry to see what their failure rates were like. 

We won’t name our industry source here, but suffice it to say that they are from a major UK-based system builder that provides their customers with plenty of Ryzen-based desktop options. Our source claimed that they had experienced no DOA CPUs for the Ryzen 5000 series, a claim that either makes PowerGPU incredibly unlucky or our source incredibly fortunate. That said, we haven’t seen any claims of DOA Ryzen CPUs with consumers, outside of those who had their CPUs damaged in transit by couriers.

In response to these high failure rate claims, many have commented that AMD has lowered their standards to sell more chips, which is a claim that has no basis in reality. Purposefully selling sub-standard chips will only increase returns volumes. That would then place additional strain on the market as AMD will need to supply new customers while also replacing returned/faulty processors. This would result in a poor customer experience, and not do anything to combat their supply shortfall. 

Has AMD shipped DOA Ryzen processors? 

Yes, almost certainly. It is rare for any product to be shipped internationally and be 100% free of any faults. There is a reason why returns policies exist amongst retailers and why governments enforce fair trading practices. 

When companies ship thousands of processors, there will always be a few duds in the mix. The same is true for Intel, AMD and Nvidia. Product failures happen, that is a simple fact of life. Based on our industry sources, AMD’s Ryzen 5000 series isn’t experiencing failure rates that are any higher than what could be considered normal. 

  
AMD’s Response

In response to Tech Radar’s inquiry, AMD claimed that they are investigating these claims and that they are “unaware of any similar issues”, which means that no other system builders have reported similar issues. If we take AMD at their word, it means that Ryzen 5000 series failure rates are within industry norms and that PowerPC may have been unlucky or the victim of some strange hardware compatibility issues. 
 

    AMD is looking into a claim by a custom PC builder regarding higher-than-expected failure rates they are experiencing with Ryzen 5000 series desktop processors. We are unaware of any similar issues at this time.

 
Should you be worried about failing Ryzen 5000 series processors? The simple answer is no. There is no evidence of any widespread Ryzen 5000 series failures, though AMD are taking these claims seriously. 

You can join the discussion on AMD’s Ryzen 5000 series failure rates on the OC3D Forums.