ASRock is a well-known manufacturer of motherboards and other PC components, for both consumers and industry. But right now it’s also well-known for high-end AMD 9000 CPUs, especially in some custom builds. That’s not ideal if you want to keep manufacturing motherboards. After a recent exposé video, the company is trying to make some PR headway.
A little background. Through the spring and summer of this year, a small buy notable number of recent AMD Ryzen Zen5 processors have been failing, and an inordinate number of them have been in ASRock’s motherboards. Various explanations and solutions have been put forward, and there’s been the usual finger-pointing among different companies, but the preponderance of evidence seems to indicate that this is a specific problem with ASRock boards.
That impression is backed up, if not totally confirmed, by a recent Gamers Nexus video. Gamers Nexus has been absolutely killing it lately with the team’s deep dive investigations, and this one’s no different. GN says there’s no complete smoking gun so far, but it sure seems that specific batches of ASRock motherboards are causing AMD CPU failures, both on the consumer and data center side.
So yeah, ASRock’s CPU problem has been nagging it for months, and it doesn’t look like it’s going away anytime soon. It seems like the company is trying to offer some extra assurance to customers, at least in some areas. VideoCardz reports that ASRock Japan is offering extended three-year motherboard warranties (an extra year over standard) to the affected 800-series AMD boards, as well as equivalent Intel boards.
There’s just one catch: You have to join the ASRock Fan Club in order to qualify. Just registering the board alone won’t cut it. If that sounds familiar, you might have heard a little something similar from Microsoft, which pulled the same move to incentivize Windows 10 users for an extra year of security updates.
It’s interesting that this would debut in Japan, as ASRock is based out of Taiwan. There’s no indication that this will spread to other areas, though that’s certainly possible. I have to say that getting people to sign up for spam marketing (and some data collection/tracking, I would assume) to achieve better support, after a big PR blunder, doesn’t inspire me to look for the ASRock logo on my next PC part purchase.