It would seem that not all is well in the world of AMD’s newest processors, the Phenom X4 9850Apparently quite a few people are finding that their motherboards based on the 780G and 770 chipsets, also from AMD, might not support the power levels that the X4 9850 and Athlon X2 6400+ require.

Both of those CPUs are 125W TDP units – higher than the rest of AMD’s current lineup and that is causing some issues on motherboards that weren’t designed up to a certain specified level.  What is even more disappointing on this issue is some motherboard vendors claimed support for both of these CPUs on their websites initially, only to remove them later; obviously that will piss off anyone that had already purchased the board.

If anyone has these issues, please drop by our forums to discuss – I am curious to see what you all are seeing.
Because we are always busy testing stuff and getting new information for you, we were not able to read all of the interweb. Anandtech wrote an article two days ago which you can find here where this problem has been stated in detail.

We spoke to J&W about this issue, and they explained the Mosfets may handle a 9850 when properly cooled, but most customers will stuff such boards in small cases and even when not overclocked the VRM will fail and blow up eventually because of bad airflow in such cases. Anandtech tried on an ASUS board which failed within seconds.

Of course, this has to do with cost. A five or more phases VRM design costs much more and the budget market is very price-sensitive.

We spoke with AMD and AMD has guidelines where partners can learn how to build the VRM in such way it will handle all CPUs, but it is not as strict as Intel. AMD partners had the flexibility to use the cheaper components and make the 770 and 780G motheboards that won’t work with 125W Phenom 9850 CPUs.