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Image: AMD
Some AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX owners have claimed that their graphics cards are getting way too hot, and the reason for that may be a defective vapor chamber, according to Roman “der8auer” Hartung, a popular overclocker who has tested red team’s latest flagship GPU in various orientations, including developing a custom stand, and determined that there appears to be some kind of design flaw with the $899 RNDA 3 product.
“It is the vapor chamber,” Hartung confidently states at the end of the video, published on New Year’s Day, before opining that AMD is going to be in “big trouble” for this alleged misstep in engineering.
AMD critics have pointed out that this is an especially bad look for the company, being that it tried to publicly shame NVIDIA for its 16-pin power connectors, which burned up and failed for some GeForce RTX 4090 owners.
Now it looks like AMD has its own major controversy to worry about.
“We are aware that a limited number of users are experiencing unexpected thermal throttling on AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics cards (reference models made by AMD),” reads a statement from AMD.
“Users experiencing unexpected thermal throttling of an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX should contact AMD Support.”
Update: January 9th, 2023, to add the below from AMD.
We are working to determine the root cause of the unexpected throttling experienced by some while using the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics cards made by AMD. Based on our observations to-date, we believe the issue relates to the thermal solution used in the AMD reference design and appears to be present in a limited number of the cards sold. We are committed to solving this issue for impacted cards. Customers experiencing this unexpected throttling should contact AMD Support (https://www.amd.com/en/support/contact-call).
