Ryzen CPUs don't have a reputation for reliability problems, especially in comparison to Intel's Raptor Lake competitors. However, no CPU is completely immune to instability issues. YouTuber Tech Yes City stumbled upon one such chip, a dying Ryzen 7 5800X featuring serious instability problems.
The YouTuber grabbed the 5800X from a seller who failed to get the chip working fully after trying a variety of troubleshooting options. The chip was allegedly the second 5800X in his possession, and stopped working after just 12 months of use. TechYesCity promised to pay the owner $30 for the chip if he could get the chip working.
After cleaning the chip and bending a few bent pins back into position, the YouTuber set about troubleshooting the 5800X's stability issues. First, they let the CPU sit in the BIOS for 30 minutes to see if it would crash in the BIOS. Thankfully, the chip passed, indicating that the chip's cores were not damaged.
However, the CPU crashed during a 3-hour OCCT stress test, which was the next test the YouTuber conducted. The stability issues were severe as the system allegedly hard crashed and didn't error out or BSOD.
The YouTuber was able to fix the CPU's stability issues by going into the BIOS and downclocking the CPU through AMD's PBO tools, adding a negative 300 MHz offset to the chip. After saving and going back into Windows, the 5800X succesfuly passed one hour of OCCT's stress test.
Downclocking the 5800X confirmed that the chip was suffering from degradation, causing at least one of the CPU cores to destabilize at the chip's higher boost frequencies. Tech Yes City benchmarked the downclocked chip in several games to see where the chip would stack up against the 5700X and other more modern Ryzen CPUs. Surprisingly, the CPU was still able to maintain competitive gaming performance, even outperforming the 5700X in some titles despite having a 300MHz reduction in clock speed.
For instance, in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, the downclocked Ryzen 7 5800X achieved a 152 FPS average, and the Ryzen 7 5700X achieved 147 FPS.
A CPU should never degrade within several years of use, let alone 12 months or less. However, Tech Yes City's downclocking technique is an effective stopgap solution for rectifying stability issues from accelerated CPU degradation. This technique was especially common practice with Intel's Raptor Lake CPUs before the CPU maker released firmware updates to rectify the architecture's issues.
