Certain Threadripper 7000 Series processors contain fuses that permanently blow when the processor gets overclocked.
Are you one of those people who regularly overclocks your CPUs and GPUs to get more bang for your bucks? I don’t, mainly because I couldn’t be bothered, but it’s pretty much common knowledge that lots and lots and lots of gamers do, mainly to give them something of a competitive edge (kinda like professional atheletes taking steroids).
Unlike steroid use, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with overclocking your machine (I’m pretty sure it’s not even against the rules when playing games), but you do need to know that if you don’t know what your doing you run the risk of damaging your hardware. Along the same line, if you do damage your silicon in the process, the damage won’t be covered by the warranties from most if not all chipmakers.
But how would they know? you ask. That one’s easy for AMD to answer according to an article published by Tom’s Hardware on Wednesday. Zhiye Liu writes that AMD has built “fuses” into certain Threadripper 7000 Series processors that permanently “blow” when the processor gets overclocked. When the fuse blows, nothing bad happens to the processor — it still works as normal — but send it back to collect on a warranty, and AMD knows you’ve been overclocking it.
AMD wants you to know that overclocking their silicon doesn’t in or by itself invalidate a warranty. That doesn’t happen unless the overclocking caused damage.
“To be clear, blowing this fuse does not void your warranty,” an AMD representative told Tom’s Hardware. “Statements that enabling an overclocking/overvolting feature will ‘void’ the processor warranty are not correct. Per AMD’s standard Terms of Sale, the warranty excludes any damage that results from overclocking/overvolting the processor. However, other unrelated issues could still qualify for warranty repair/replacement.”
It appears that some motherboards also throw up a warning when a Threadripper processor blows its fuse — a message that sometimes makes claims about invalidated warranties that don’t fit with AMD’s actual policies. Evidently AMD is aware of this problem and has been working with motherboard makers to get them to tone down the rhetoric and to quit scaring the bejezus out of users.
You can read Tom’s Hardware’s complete coverage here: AMD says overclocking blows a hidden fuse on Ryzen Threadripper 7000 to show if you’ve overclocked the chip, but it doesn’t automatically void your CPU’s warranty
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
