In an interview with Senior Vice President and General Manager of AMD Radeon, Scott Herkelman, and PCWorld‘s Gordon Mah Ung, Herkelman confirmed that a small percentage of the company’s reference Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics cards had “temperature issues”. A small batch of RX 7900 XTX produced by AMD came with a faulty cooling system that caused the affected cards to overheat. The overheating boards will be replaced, Herkelman promised. The problem only concerns ‘Made by AMD’ add-in-boards. Radeon RX 7900 XTX devices designed and produced by its partners are not affected.
The senior vice president of AMD said that the company knew how to identify reference Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics cards with faulty cooling systems and that all of them will be replaced. He advised those impacted to call AMD if the RDNA 3 based graphics card was purchased from its online store or ask its partners for a replacement if you bought a reference ‘Made by AMD’ board from them.
“We have the fix we are ready to send it to you. Just call our tech support line if you bought it from amd.com or if you bought it from one of our AIB partners call them, they have [replacement] units,” said Herkelman. “We know how to make sure and identify that they are good, and we will ship it to you right away because we want you to have a great product.”
“It all comes down to a small batch of vapor chamber actually have an issue, not enough water and it is a very small percentage,” said Scott Herkelman, Senior Vice President and General Manager of AMD’s Graphics Business Unit. “We said OK, that is the root cause.”
Reports about overheating AMD’s reference Radeon RX 7900 XTX — which is one of the best graphics cards around — started to show up in the second half of December as numerous users experienced performance degradation as GPU temperature reached 110 degrees Celsius junction temperature. AMD said that 110°C was within specifications of its Navi 31 graphics processor, which is why it should not cause any performance throttling. Later on, it turned out that some of its reference Radeon RX 7900 XTX products shipped with coolers featuring a faulty vapor chamber and therefore not performing as AMD specified, which caused performance degradation.
The GPU developer stresses that reference “Made by AMD” Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics cards are safe to use. Furthermore, Made by AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT parts do not have any issues with overheating as they use a different design with a different cooling system. The same is true for all non-reference AMD Radeon RX 7900-series graphics cards made by the company’s AIB partners.