The reference design for AMD’s flagship RDNA 3 GPU garnered early accolades for being relatively sleek and properly accommodating the 2x 8-pin power connectors.But those Made By AMD (MBA) designs could suffer from heat issues – at least that’s the German tech site. hardware lux We are investigating reports of Radeon RX 7900 XT(X) cards suffering from high temperature hot spots, loud fans, and thermal throttling.
An AMD spokesperson confirmed in a statement to HardwareLuxx that they are investigating the issue. “Our GPU team is currently investigating the issue.”
Using a few reviews and data from forum users, HardwareLuxx appears to have a custom Radeon 7900 XT(X) design with a maximum difference of 20 degrees Celsius between the average GPU temperature and hot hot spots I showed that. This means that even if the GPU temperature reaches 80C, the hotspot will remain below 100C and the graphics card will not throttle.
However, in the MBA reference design, we have observed a GPU/hot spot temperature difference of 53 degrees Celsius (56 degrees Celsius GPU with 109 degrees hot spot), which seems to be a somewhat consistent issue. This means that a modest GPU with an average temperature of around 60C can start throttling if the hotspot reaches 110C.
If MBA designs suffer from this large GPU-to-hot-spot delta and third-party designs don’t, the obvious culprit seems to be AMD’s reference cooling design. HardwareLuxx didn’t jump to this conclusion. Instead, we chose to discuss that direct die cooling of the Navi 31 GPU is difficult due to the chiplet design presenting an uneven surface to the cooler. Specifically, editor Andreas Schilling “We suspect that non-uniform contact pressure is the cause of the high temperature differential.”
Looking at the bare PCB, according to this publication, the middle GCD and the 6 MCDs are filled and look horizontal, so there’s something causing the uneven contact issues (GPU frames, etc.) There is a possibility. In our tests, the reference model Radeon RX 7900 XT(X) card didn’t look particularly noisy, and we didn’t have any throttling or temperature issues (it hit a respectable max of 70C). . However, it’s certainly possible that more intense workloads will result in higher temperatures. For example, FurMark showed fairly low GPU clocks in the 1650-1700 MHz range.
Whatever the issue is, AMD seems to be looking into it. I hope you find a solution. We may also look into noisy fans and other issues faced by Radeon RX 7900 XT(X) owners.
