General consensus on that case seems to be they picked a budget motherboard and skimped on the cooler.

That ASUS motherboard is far from the cheapest available. If using it makes the user liable for failure, a large part of the market is unsuitable.

For both the cooler and the motherboard, AMD have too much control to look the other way. The chip can measure its own temperature and the conceit of undermining partners by moving things on chip and controlling more of the ecosystem is that things perform better. They should at least perform.

The cpu is what a 9950x whilst paired with one of the cheapest asus motherboards with underpowered VRMs according to games nexus, hardware unboxed.

The cooler was under the rated tdp of the platform. That and it lasted 6 months and so far seemed the only case of it falling over like it did.

Yea am leaning on it being user error.

In my experience building PCs this is not so curious. There are just a lot of duds, from individual SKUs to entire generations, and both manufacturers and retailers will do anything to prevent you RMAing them.

I also find that, as performance improvements tolerances get tighter throughout the system, the set of 'things that can screw your build' grows bigger.