AMD’s Radeon Technologies Group may have another situation to clean up. Following the RX 7900 XTX heatsink/vapor chamber debacle, reports of a bugged driver damaging the RX 6000 series GPUs have surfaced. According to several Redditors, their Radeon RX 6800 XT/6900 XT graphics cards died shortly after they updated the Adrenaline driver to 22.11.2 WHQL.
KrisFix-Germany, a YouTuber known for bringing dead hardware back to life, claims he received 61 Radeon RX 6800 and 6900 series graphics cards this month. Out of them, 48 were unfixable due to electrical damage to the power railings.
Using a multimeter, Kris determined that the SoC, memory, and memory controller rails were all fried. This isn’t something that should happen under recommended operating conditions. Generally, running the hardware beyond the prescribed power/voltage limits is the most common reason for these occurrences.
Reports of drivers permanently damaging hardware are quite rare. We can’t discount the possibility that a recent batch of Radeon RX 6800 XT/6900 XT cards may have shipped with certain manufacturing defects. Either way, AMD has much to sort out on the GPU side of its team.
