AMD Confirms Radeon RX 7900 XTX Thermal Solution Issues, Committed To Provide A Solution To Affected Users
Over the past week, users started reporting a serious issue with the Radeon RX 7900 XTX ‘MBA’ reference graphics cards that caused overheating and resulted in thermal throttling. This made reference designs perform worse since they were running at lower clock speeds and while the initial response from AMD was that everything was ‘Normal’ and declined an RMA to a customer, the company later softened its position and asked affected users to contact the support team. Now, after a few days of investigation, AMD is still determining the root cause of the throttling & overheating issues but has provided us with the following statement which more or less confirms the issue might be related to the thermal design which is something that has also been pointed by hardware experts such as Der8auer and Igor’s Lab. AMD states that the problem is present within a limited number of Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics cards but it looks like the actual number of affected graphics cards might be higher and within the range of 1000s as mentioned by Igor’s Lab. Igor has talked with a few system builders/distributors who states that the issues have been known for weeks and it isn’t just one batch that is affected but several (4-6 to speak). Following are some of the quotes from Igors Lab: We are committed to solving this issue for impacted cards. Customers experiencing this unexpected throttling should contact AMD Support (https://www.amd.com/en/support/contact-call). via AMD There have also been reports that the problem arises around 2-3 weeks into the usage of the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics cards so there may be more cases popping up soon if that is true. The Radeon RX 7900 XTX MBA ‘Reference’ graphics cards were amongst the first designs to hit retail shelves and a lot of users bought them since they were the only ones priced at MSRP. But now, these same graphics cards are affected by thermal throttling and overheating issues which may lead to a major recall or RMA. As assumed, the cause is the evaporator chamber… Several batches are affected. Currently, 4-6 batches and thousands of graphics cards are assumed. Only MBA cards are affected. (quote from email) We had to return 300+ graphics cards of Asus MBA, Sapphire MBA, PowerColor MBA, XFX MBA to the retailers/warehouse/wholesale… Complete systems also had to be disassembled for this procedure. (quote from email) End customers have to contact the vendor or AMD support directly. Distributors and stores have to send the affected graphics cards to wholesalers and warehouses. (quote from email) via Igor’s Lab
