It’s probably fair to say that this holiday season hasn’t been the best time for AMD. First, the company had to admit that its recently released Made By AMD (MBA) reference 7900 XTX cards were indeed affected by a vapor chamber problem with extremely high hotspot temperatures of around 110°C. were causing And now there may be more trouble brewing as Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs are said to be breaking when using the latest WHQL signed 22.11.2 driver.
This report comes from KrisFix-Germany, a YouTuber who repairs graphics cards, and other hardware components. The YouTuber alleges that he received 61 Radeon RX 6800 and 6900 series GPUs of which 48 were completely dead and essentially unfixable.
When using a multimeter to take electronics readings, Chris Fix noted that the rails for the SoC, memory, and memory controller were all shorted. This shorting may be caused by the chips themselves breaking and messing up the metal PCB layers.
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When news of this potential issue broke, some Reddit users also spoke about similar experiences they claimed to have had with their cards after updating to the 22.11.2 driver.
Severity 92 wrote:
This is madness. My RX 6900xt recently died. About a day after I installed the new driver.
Frandon added:
This is crazy to see because my 6900xt that was bought directly from amd died around December 20th. I was luckily still under warranty and AMD gave me my money back because they said they couldn’t replace my card.
Another user, Engineer W writes:
Count me in. I had to replace my 6900 xt a month ago. I upgraded to the latest drivers at that time. I also used the Auto Undervolt feature in the Adrenaline software. Then, I played Black Mesa with every setting on Ultra at 144hz 4k for an hour. I turned off the PC. The GPU never came back the next day.
Edit – my GPU is a reference 6900 xt model. After I updated to 22.11.2 recommended whql the GPU died. Never mined with it. Benchmarking/gaming/productivity only
At this point, it’s hard to confirm whether the problem is really related to the display driver or something else. Also, the scale of this supposed problem is hard to determine at this point, because it could be like a bad batch of cards.
