Some of AMD’s RX 6000 graphics cards froze completely, and a bunch of dead GPUs were suddenly brought to our attention by a German repair shop.
The store KrisFix is at youtube (opens in a new tab) (pass world technology (opens in a new tab)Buildzoid also flagged on Twitter), and the visual evidence provided is indeed worrying.
RX 6800/6900 series cards seem to have a core failure for some reason: https://t.co/NScb6rQbkrJanuary 10, 2023
We’re talking about a cracked GPU, same thing, when that happens to the chip, the whole graphics card is of course immediately logged off.
KrisFix told us that in the past three weeks, he has received 61 AMD graphics cards for repair — namely the RX 6900 and 6800 models — and 48 of them had the exact same problem, cracked GPUs.
That’s almost 80% of all models sent in for repair, which has to be said is an astonishingly high percentage; all of them he observed further had shorted SOC rails, shorted memory rails, and shorted memory controller rails (indicating a GPU disaster) . Typically, he expects about 10 percent of the graphics cards he receives to have problems like cracked chips — not 80 percent.
The boards in question have one thing in common, though — KrisFix points out that they’re all running the same graphics driver, the latest from AMD.
We’ve reached out to AMD for comment on what might have happened here, and will update this story if we hear back.
Analysis: Is mining chaos a possibility?
As KrisFix pointed out, it’s hard to be sure what’s going on here, but given the commonality with the driver, he speculates that maybe the latest Adrenalin version (released a month ago) is pushing performance harder and maybe some RX 6000 GPUs can’t handle it this problem.
At the same time, he’s very clear that he doesn’t have enough information to make a judgment call, and it’s clear that we can’t yet draw any firm conclusions about whether the graphics driver is actually at fault.
At the moment we only have news from a German repair facility, KrisFix admits we have to be very cautious and we need further evidence. In fact, if there is a real issue with the RX 6800 and 6900 GPUs, surely we’ll be hearing more about it a month after the driver release?
On the other hand, you could argue how many people regularly update their graphics drivers. Of course there are a lot of people who will stick with the same GPU driver for a while and definitely won’t accept every release.
Another possibility is that the problem is limited to some graphics cards, not all of them. This is another place where the suggestion comes into play – the affected models are pre-mining GPUs. Last year, as the mining business threw in the towel, they sold off the graphics cards in the farm, and those GPUs were whipped to death almost 24 hours a day.
So it’s not an exaggeration to assume that many gamers have bought used stock of these pre-mining AMD GPUs – likely unaware that they are pre-mining models as sellers usually hide this for obvious reasons – and These have become problems.
Maybe the problem is with those ex-mine cards and new driver. If the latter does push higher performance – interestingly, some owners mention a slight increase in frame rate – perhaps this will bog down some GPUs that are dying anyway. Of course, all of this is just speculation.
It’s also worth noting that after updating to the latest AMD drivers, there have been scattered reports of coil whining and hotter hot spots, which may again indicate that the GPU is being pushed harder. But we’ll really have to wait and see if there are more reports of problems with the RX 6000 cards now that the alleged issues have been made public.
If it does turn out to be a problem with the graphics drivers themselves, it’s not going to be a good thing for AMD considering 2023 hasn’t started yet and Team Red is already going through a GPU crisis with their new RX 7900 XTX flagship and the cooling something wrong. Of course, the second crisis at the beginning of this year will be very embarrassing.
