About two weeks ago, several owners of AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX reported experiencing an overheating issue for the GPU hot-spot, with its temperature reaching 110 degrees Celsius, causing the graphics card to downclock and in turn causing thermal throttling and a drop in performance.
Some owners frustrated by the issue had their RMA requests rejected, where AMD’s response came saying that “Temperatures are normal”.
Roman ‘der8auer’ Hartung did some extensive tests on several reference / MBA (Made-by-AMD) models, and came to the conclusion that the vapor chamber itself must be defective, with several theories that the specific cause might be wrong pressure of the liquid inside, or that there is simply not liquid / water inside the chamber.
AMD Admits There is ‘Not Enough Water’ Inside The Vapor Chamber
Well it turns out Roman was right, talking to Gordon Ung from PC World, AMD’s Senior Vice President & General Manager Graphics Scott Herkelman indeed confirmed that there are performance throttling issues affecting some RX 7900 XTX cards, with the root cause being that a batch of MBA vapor chambers simply do not have enough water inside.
It all comes down to a small batch of our vapor chambers that actually have an issue, not enough water, and it’s a very small percentage.
Scott Herkelman
Scott Herkelman also stressed that there are no safety concerns, and that the issues only affects a ‘very small percentage’ of RX 7900 XTX cards.
He also downplayed the impact of thermal throttling on performance, saying it’s only a “small performance delta” when the 7900XTX starts to throttle.
What we found is if you throttle at a 110°C under certain workloads, you would see a small performance delta.
Scott Herkelman
Meanwhile, some rumors are currently circulating that AMD does not actually have enough 7900 XTX units to fulfill RMA requests from customers, but Scott Herkelman says different.
We’ve identified this (Issue), if you bought the 7900 XTX MBA, we wanna fix it for you, we have the fix, and we’re ready to send it to you.
Just call our tech support line if you bought it from amd.com or one of our AIB partners, they have units and we’ll ship it to you right away.
Scott Herkelman
Source: PCWorld