Hey everyone,
I kept seeing posts about X3D chips dying on AM5 boards (especially the ASRock ones lately), and I couldn't tell if it was actually a wave or just the same few stories getting reposted. So I got a bit obsessed and wrote a little bot to go through a full year of Reddit and count the cases properly. Wanted to share what I found and get your thoughts.
How it works, roughly:
The bot searches Reddit (a bunch of relevant subs like , , , , , … plus a global search) for every X3D model (7800X3D, 9800X3D, 9950X3D and the rest) combined with a big list of "death" words: dead, died, fried, killed, bricked, DOA, RMA, "no post", "won't boot", "black screen", "burn marks", and so on. It runs each search across different sort orders (new, top, relevance, comments) so it doesn't miss stuff, and it covers about the last 12 months.
The tricky part was filtering. I made it strict, a post only counts if the title has all three of these at once : an AM5 X3D CPU, a death/failure word, and a motherboard (a chipset like B650/B850/X670/X870, or a brand, or just the word "motherboard"). I also explicitly throw out AM4 stuff and anything that's really about a GPU/monitor/game. Then some regex pulls out the brand, chipset and model (Taichi, Tomahawk, ProArt, etc.) for each post.
I know being strict on the title means I lose some real cases where the board is only mentioned in the body, that was a conscious trade-off, I'd rather miss a few than post a list full of junk.
The manual pass:
After all that I still had 300+ hits, so I went through every single one by hand and deleted the false positives (jokes, user error that got fixed, duplicates, unrelated failures). What was left were genuine "X3D died on an AM5 board" reports.
The results (by motherboard brand):
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ASRock : 145
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ASUS : 44
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MSI : 11
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Gigabyte : 7
So 207 cleaned reports in total, and ASRock is way out in front with about 70% of them. Obviously this is Reddit, not lab data, so take it for what it is, but the gap is hard to ignore.
I put everything in a Google Sheet (with the direct links to each post and the extracted details) in case you want to dig through it yourselves, happy to share it :
A few things I'd love help with, since I'm sure my method has holes:
- What keywords or title phrasings am I probably missing?
- Any subreddits I should add?
- Best way to handle duplicates / people posting updates about the same chip?
- Anything about the method that would obviously skew the numbers (relevance bias, deleted posts, etc.)?
Anyway, thanks for reading, and thanks to everyone who's been documenting their failures, that's the only reason this was possible. Appreciate any feedback.
