AMD has yet to fully resolve its ongoing RMA issues of the Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics cards which ended up with a faulty thermal solution and now there are reports of the older Radeon RX 6000 GPUs that have mysteriously started dying.
German Repair Shop Receives 48 Dead AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series GPUs With Dead Chips, Bad Drivers To Blame?
Update (1/21/2023): KrisFix has now posted a new video where he states that the issue was a result of a bad driver but the majority of the cards he received seemingly came from a mining farm and were mistreated and put under a humid environment that led to the GPUs to crack over time. KrisFix posted a follow-up video to explain the entire situation which is provided below:
German Techtuber and repair shop, KrisFix-Germany, posted a video sharing how his shop has received several AMD Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards for repair. The shop got 61 cards in total which were a mix of Radeon RX 6900 and RX 6800 series flavors and out of 61, 48 cards had come with a dead GPU. Kris states that this is the first time he has seen so many GPUs come to his shop with dead GPUs.
But it's not just the GPU that has died, all 48 cards come with shorted SOC rail, shorted memory rail a shorted memory controller rail. Upon asking users what they were specifically doing with the cards, most of them responded differently. Some said they were gaming normally while others were watching YouTube or even had their PC on idle when the GPU died on them. But one thing that matched across all affected GPUs was the driver version. It is stated that all GPUs were using the latest drivers which launched last year in December aka Adrenalin 22.11.2 (WHQL).
Also, KrisFix doesn't mention what AIBs came with the dead GPUs but the one shown in the video is an AMD MBA design which is used by the reference Radeon RX 6900 / RX 6800 graphics cards. Now we can't blame this on either the drivers or this particular variant yet without investigating further into the problem but it should definitely be taken seriously.
RX 6800/6900 series cards seem to be suffering core failures for some reason: https://t.co/NScb6rQbkr
— Buildzoid (@Buildzoid1) January 10, 2023
KrisFix also shares some close-up shots of the GPUs that were cracked and it looks like pretty serious damage.
For now, we can advise users to not use the latest drivers for their cards as Buildzoid states that it won't be the first time that a GPU manufacturer would accidentally disable the thermal protection in a new driver release. Some users have also reported hearing aggressive coil whine on the newer drivers which wasn't there before.
About the author: A Software Engineer by training and a PC enthusiast by passion, Hassan Mujtaba serves as Wccftech's Senior Editor for hardware section. With years of experience in the industry, he specializes in deep-dive technical analysis of next-generation CPU and GPU architectures, motherboards, and cooling solutions. His work involves not only breaking news on upcoming technologies but also extensive hands-on reviews and benchmarking.
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