PowerColor's Radeon RX 7900 XTX Red Devil graphics cards are hot. And, no, we don't mean that they are very popular, but they are afflicted with abnormally high temperatures. Improper thermal application is discovered to be the issue by Igor Wallossek of Igor's Lab.
GPU heat spikes on the PowerColor Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics card led to immediate fixes from the company
PowerColor's Red Devil Radeon RX 7900 series are the flagship offerings based on the new RDNA 3 architecture. Unlike the company's water-cooling Liquid Devil graphics cards, the design is modeled after an air cooler.
Wallossek discovered the temperature spike during the initial testing of the graphics card. He used a "Borderlands 3 savefile with rBAR enabled in Ultra-HD," and the graphics set to maximum. Upon this testing, he found that the GPU fans were throttling and realized the graphics card spiked to 110° C. While this is not uncommon for GPUs to spike that high, compared to the reference RX 7900 XTX GPU produces up to 19 Kelvin difference while the PowerColor Red Devil was hitting a 30 Kelvin difference (between 80°C and 110°C), which is much higher than atypically produced. Even the Sapphire Nitro+ GPU achieves a 22 Kelvin difference.
Wallossek took the Radeon RX 7900 XTX custom GPU apart, only to find that the thermal interface material (TIM - in this case, the TIM is thermal paste) was applied unevenly on the GPU die. The GPU die had areas where there was no TIM covering, which would lead to temperature throttling. He reapplied the TIM properly to ensure better thermal conduction and reassembled the card. After running more tests, the temperatures decreased by fifteen degrees to 75° C while the hotspot lowered to 95° C.
Once he notified the company, PowerColor issued an official statement confirming product line issues.
We have identified an issue on our production line where some cards are experiencing higher hot spot temperatures than usual. We verified that this happens to a small percentage of the total output, and we are already in the process of replacing the thermal grease. With the new input from IgorLabs we are also verifying if changing the way we mount the cooler onto the card adds to improved thermal performance . We are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible to ensure that our customers receive only the highest quality products. If anyone is experiencing this issue, please reach out to info@powercolor.com.
— PowerColor statement
While the problem is not isolated to just the PowerColor Radeon RX 7900 XTX Red Devil GPU, according to Wallossek, the company assures users that the company is fixing the thermal application on the GPUs in the future. Additionally, the company has invited the reviewer and his team to tour the factory in Taiwan during this year's Computex convention. Hopefully, Wallossek's advice makes the company improve its designs. The custom models aren't the only ones having trouble as AMD's own reference model was affected by a major cooler defect which made the GPU run at 110C GPU temps, read more on that here.
News Sources: Igor's Lab, VideoCardz
