The controversy over AMD’s new flagship Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics cards is largely overblown, according to Scott Herkelman, Senior Vice President & General Manager Graphics Business Unit at AMD, who was stopped by PCWorld’s Gordon Ung at CES 2023 to discuss the alleged cooler issue and stated that while AMD did identify a problem with the product’s vapor chamber cooler, only a small batch of units are affected and the company already has a fix, with replacements available to ship.
“There’s not a safety concern,” Herkelman clarified. “We were able to root cause that. Is there a performance potential issue? And what we found is if you throttle it 110 degrees in certain workloads, you would see a small performance delta. And so then we said, okay, we should root cause this and what is going on. And it all comes down to a small batch of our vapor chambers actually have an issue, not enough water, and it’s a very small percentage.”
“Just call our tech support line,” Herkelman goes on to tell affected users. “If you bought it from me … or if you bought it from one of our AIB partners, call them. They have units … We know how to make sure and identify that they’re good and we’ll ship it to you right away because we want you to have a great product and we want you to be confident in that product when you use it.”
The interview later shifts gears to whether or not the Radeon RX 7900 XT is still the fastest GPU under $900, as AMD had claimed before the release of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti, which began leaving shelves yesterday, to which Herkelman says yes with much confidence.
“We can still claim that we have the best GPU for you under $900,” he said. “And by the way, we also have the best GPU for under $1,000.”