Well-known overclocker Der8auer has shared a statement from ASUS following reports about BIOS files mysteriously disappearing from its website. The discovery of the missing BIOSes happened while multiple users were reporting that their Ryzen 7000 X3D series were failing and when removed they could clearly see bulges on the PCB. There were numerous theories as to what happened and rather than add to them Der8auer reached out to ASUS on the matter. ASUS indicated that it implemented new protection and monitoring mechanisms in the latest BIOS and thus removed the older ones. It also said that manual Vcore control was available in the older BIOSes which was another reason they were removed.
Voltage issues
While the majority of the users reporting damage to their processors were using various ASUS X670 motherboards there were some who stated a similar experience with ASRock and MSI boards. This led to MSI releasing voltage-restricting firmware for its boards. All of of this in turn led to more speculation which appears to be nearing confirmation. A commenter on an Igor’s Lab forum (via VideoCardz) posted a theory that is gaining traction as the culprit for this damage.
“It is due to the EXPO parameters that AMD specifies. Asus and Gigabyte have implemented these 1:1 without paying attention to the new X3D CCD. While “X” cpus tolerate higher voltages, the X3D die off one after the other because they are much more sensitive.
As soon as Expo is enabled, the CPU SOC and CPU VDDIO/MC voltages increase to 1.36-1.4, sometimes boosting to 1.5V in Windows, causing instant death on the X3d. If you set all voltages manually to the correct values, there are no problems.
— impi182“
While this theory seems plausible a new discovery could indicate that X3D CPUs are not the only ones susceptible to this damaging phenomenon. Der8auer shares a discovery of his own towards the end of his video when reveals a Ryzen 9 7900X processor with the same damage. He too says that EXPO is likely the root cause but that this setting is not only common to ASUS but that the damaged 7900X had been installed on a GIGABYTE board. So in conclusion using EXPO with X3D and non-X3D Ryzen 7000 series CPUs could damage them if it increases the voltages too high.