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AMD’s RX 7900 XTX flagship GPU could be having a problem with its vapor chamber, and this could be the cause of worrying reports of seriously high hot spot temperatures plaguing the graphics card.
Tom’s hardware (opens in new tab) reports that overclocking expert Der8auer bought four RX 7900 XTX graphics cards (using the reference design) and ran some tests (in a video (opens in new tab) on his YouTube channel) to determine what is behind the overheating issues identified in some cases (with temperatures reaching around 110°C).
Der8auer did find that mounting the RX 7900 XTX vertically caused it to run cooler compared to horizontally, at least with these four graphics cards, but this wasn’t the full story – there were complaints from people using a vertically mounted 7900 XTX about high hot spot temperatures , too (and in one case for Der8auer, a vertically mounted card saw some pretty high temps).
The question then was, while the mounting configuration seemed to have an impact, what was the actual underlying cause of these hot spots?
Der8auer explored several theories, such as whether the cooler’s enormous weight was a problem pulling it away from the card, whether the mounting pressure was insufficient – or whether there was indeed a problem with the thermal paste. However, after some very thorough testing, he has eliminated all these aspects as possible causes.
According to Der8auer, this left only one culprit as the main cause: the vapor chamber. He suggested that the pressure in the vapor chamber could be wrong, or the wrong amount of liquid could have been used in the chamber – or there could just be an obvious design flaw with the way the chamber is built.
In a follow-up video (opens in new tab) which was just released, Der8auer says there doesn’t seem to be a physical design flaw with the vapor chamber, but rather that AMD didn’t put enough liquid in it. While he admits he’s by no means an expert on the subject, that conclusion was drawn in collaboration with Igor’s Lab and a vapor chamber manufacturer – but it’s still an assumption, mind you, so we need to be very careful here to go.
Analysis: Bigger potential meltdown than Nvidia’s RTX 4090?
Of course, we don’t want to jump to conclusions based on a few YouTube videos viewing just four 7900 XTX graphics cards, and we need to investigate this issue further – preferably, of course, from AMD, which is investigating. That said, Der8auer is very firm with his claim of the issue here, and he believes AMD could be in “major trouble” on this issue.
Especially since compared to Nvidia’s melting adapter problem with the RTX 4090, which had about 50 incidents recorded, there are many more reports of this overheating error with AMD’s new flagship.
Therefore, Der8auer suggests AMD can’t really concern themselves with an RMA (return and replace) of affected graphics cards since there are so many of them; and rather that Team Red may have to issue a recall of the affected RX 7900 XTX models (those with the reference design and cooler – custom third-party designs are different, of course).
As for what will actually happen, we’ll just have to keep an eye on this space. But right now, these are seriously troubling rumors for AMD as the company is currently investigating these issues, as we mentioned.
The last statement we heard from AMD on this topic was: “We are investigating reports that some AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics cards (reference models made by AMD) are reaching 110C temperature and throttling. Thermal throttling can affect the performance of the card by lowering clock speeds, but the graphics card can still be used.”
Team Red then advised affected parties to contact AMD support, but with the e-ticket system unavailable for maintenance (until January 5) you can only do this over the phone at the moment, which hasn’t gone over too well with either the community. None of this looks great for AMD, especially when you consider that Team Red’s pranks aimed at Nvidia for the meltdown of adapter fracas as part of the run-up to the RDNA 3 GPU launch.