Andrew Cunningham
Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4090 has had a PR squeeze for the past few months due to issues with its power connector, but it’s been proven that AMD’s latest Radeon cards can also have issues. Some users have been complaining about overheating and thermal throttling on their RX 7900 XTX GPUs and AMD confirmed the problem in a statement to Tom’s Hardware today.
“We are working to determine the root cause of unexpected throttling that some people have experienced while using their AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics card,” the statement said. Based on our observations so far, we believe this issue is related to the thermal solution used in AMD reference designs and appears to be present in the limited number of cards sold.”
Independent testing suggests that overheating issues may be caused by a failed GPU cooler vapor chamber. This issue only seems to affect 7900 XTX models using AMD’s reference design (including fans and heatsinks). ASRock, Gigabyte, PowerColor, XFX and others all offer versions of his XTX with AMD’s reference coolers as well as their own custom designed versions. Versions with custom coolers are not affected by this particular issue.
The slightly cheaper RX 7900 XT doesn’t seem to be affected either. If you have any issues with your RX 7900 XTX, AMD says you should contact their customer support department.
In our review of the RX 7900 XTX, we did not observe any higher than expected temperatures. This backs up the claim that not all cards are affected.If you can find this card at a suggested retail price of $999, it will perform solidly at 4K, and is even better than today’s high-end GPUs. It can be said that it is worth enough in the market. However, much like his RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 before it, most of the MSRP cards are out of stock and the few in stock are selling at much higher prices.
