Guys, as someone who works with a lot of custom builds, modern CPUs are much more prone to failure compared to the CPUs of just a few generations ago. There's just so much more that can go wrong with a modern CPU, and the smaller nm processes are much more prone to failure. I even think the memory controller is part of modern Ryzen CPUs, so if you run Memtest and the memory fails, swap out the memory and test again. If it fails with two sets of memory, you've probably got a failing CPU. Either that or a bad RAM slot but that's extremely rare.
Diagnosing computers is going to be extremely difficult in the future because manufacturers are putting parts of components on other components where they don't belong. I'm talking a bad power supply might not be a bad power supply, but rather a bad motherboard because a lot of the power components that are currently in the power supply will be moved onto the motherboard in future standards.
I'll be the first to admit that I don't understand all the little details about how all the components in a computer work because I just don't need to in order to do my job, which is to diagnose, swap, and replace components. I'm going to have to start really understanding the nitty gritty in order to do my job because components aren't going to be so individualized in the future.
Something similar happened in the past when they started building everything into the motherboard. In the past, EVERYTHING (other than the DIN keyboard port) used to be a separate ISA or PCI card. Serial, USB, sound, VGA, etc. were all separate cards that could just be replaced if they failed. Then they started building everything into the motherboard. I still didn't have to know the nitty gritty because if I could just narrow it down to a motherboard, I would know what to replace (the motherboard itself).
It's different nowadays. Now instead of trying to integrate everything into the motherboard, they're trying to integrate almost every component. For example, the new ATX 3.0 standard power supplies will actually be "smart" and they'll be able to tell the GPU how much power it can safely draw. What happens when the "smart" part of the power supply fails? How will you even test for that? Will it be a fire hazard? Maybe the GPU will detect that it's not receiving any info from the power supply and will just draw the minimum and when that happens GPU performance will severely suffer. So you'll get a call from a gamer saying that his games are slow even though he upgraded his graphics card and he'll want you to diagnose why. Or maybe it will just draw the maximum power and will burn out your power supply if you don't have a 1000w+ power supply. We're seeing a lot of finger pointing between GPU makers and PSU makers. Neither of them want to take responsbility for keeping your computer from catching on fire.
Computers are constantly changing. We're in the middle of a massive standards change that will affect all of us. There will be a lot of confusion when learning the new standard. But that also means there will be a lot of money up for grabs from the regular people who just can't keep up with this stuff. But we have to stop thinking of all these separate components as separate because they're really not anymore, and they're only going to get more integrated as time goes on, not less.
