AMD has confirmed that it is indeed faulty vapor chambers causing the hotspot overheating issues with its new $1,000 Radeon RX7900XTX (opens in new tab) planks.
Speak against Gordon Mah Ung from PC World (opens in new tab)AMD’s Scott Herkelman explained that the issue only affects 7900 XTX cards and only “Made by AMD” cards, rather than AIB-designed products, even though these “Made by” cards are listed both on AMD.com and sold by their board partners.
Herkelman says AMD reacted as soon as it first learned that some cards were reportedly experiencing higher-than-expected temperatures.
“We immediately took action,” says Herkelman. “First, is there a security issue? There’s no security issue. Then there’s a potential performance issue? And we found that if you hit 110 degrees in certain workloads, you’d see a little performance delta.”
AMD then began “rooting” the problem, a process that Herkelman said took two weeks, explaining that they wanted to make sure they had identified the correct cause.
“It all comes down to a small batch of vapor chambers that don’t have enough water. It’s a very small percentage,” he claims.
From here, AMD says its priority is to ensure customers get fully functioning replacement cards as soon as possible. “You spent a lot of money if you bought this XTX board. We want to fix it for you. Just call our tech support line if you bought it from AMD.com. We have units identified as good that we will ship to you right away.”
That’s great, except as we reported a few days ago (opens in new tab), AMD seemed to be dragging its feet when customers originally reached out about hotspot issues. Admittedly, it must be difficult to filter out the usual Internet screech from real-world problems. But our overall feeling is that AMD could have been more responsive sooner. After all, we’re talking about people who just spent $1,000 on a brand new GPU.
Of course, it’s not just AMD that has had problems with this new range of high-end GPUs. Nvidia’s RTX 40 series has its own story of melting power connectors. It’s a rather unelevating trend.