AMD has now further confirmed during an interview with PCWorld's Gordon Mah Ung that the thermal problems on their Radeon RX 7900 XTX reference graphics cards are related to vapor chamber coolant.
AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX Reference Graphics Cards Have A Faulty Vapor Chamber With Low Coolant That Causes Overheating, Confirms Company
The interview was done with AMD's Senior Vice President & General Manager of the Graphics Unit, Scott Herkleman who confirms that the Radeon RX 7900 XTX reference graphics cards indeed have a faulty vapor chamber on a small batch of cards that weren't filled with enough coolant and is the prime cause of the overheating issues that causes GPUs to run at up to 110C Junction temps and cause thermal throttling.
The same theory was put forward by Der8auer on his YouTube channel where he dissected an entire Radeon RX 7900 XTX reference graphics card and drilled apart its vapor chamber to point that the level of fluid within the vapor chamber might be a potential issue. This has now more or less been confirmed by AMD itself. Following is what Scott has to say about the issue:
It all comes down to a small batch of vapor chambers actually have an issue, not enough water and it is a very small percentage and we said that's the root cause.
We have identified this, you spent a lot of money if you bought this XTX made by AMD, we want to fix it for you, we have the fix, we are ready to fix it for you, just call tech support if you bought it from AMD.com or bought it from an AMD AIB Partner. They have units, we know how to identify that they are good the units and make sure that we ship it to you. We want you to have a great product and we want you to be confident in that product.
Scott Herkleman (AMD SVP of GPU Buisness) via PCWorld
Now there are reports out there based on emails from AMD themselves that the company doesn't has enough Radeon RX 7900 XTX reference graphics cards for RMA purposes. As revealed by Igors Lab in two emails, it looks like consumers might have to wait more than 2 weeks to get their hands on a replacement unit. That is all speculation for now but the emails were quite legit so it remains to be seen how the RMA process goes in the coming weeks. AMD was declining the RMA requests just a few weeks back!
Scott also threw shots at the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti graphics card and said that their Radeon RX 7900 XT is the fastest GPU under $900 US. The card is now being compared against the 4070 Ti in various games at 4K Max Settings and it looks like AMD might be comparing native (No RT/FSR) performance here. But AMD also states that they have learned from overpromising for the Radeon RX 7000 lineup and will try to tone it down and be more direct with the consumer base in the future.
