Tens of AMD Radeon RX 6800 / 6900 GPUs die in mysterious circumstances, as reported by German GPU repair service

A strange case involving defective AMD Radeon RX 6800 and 6900 GPUs has recently come to attention via a video posted on the KrisFix-Germany graphics card repair service YouTube channel. The video mentions that, over the past 3 weeks, the service received 61 RX 6800 / 6900 cards, of which 48 were completely unrepairable with shorted SOC rails, shorted memory rails and shorted memory controller rail. In one of the video comments, KrisFix specifies that the card presented in the video was once again disassembled and the GPU die appeared to be cracked, with one piece sticking to the thermal pad.

Digging deeper for the root of the problem, KrisFix reports that all 48 cards were running the Adrenalin 22.11.2 drivers. While there have been cases where drivers could accidentally disable the GPU thermal protection, it is highly unlikely the drivers alone could have caused any dies to crack. Just to be on the safe side, it could be a good idea to revert to a previous driver version for now, until more details come to light.

Some obvious questions still remain unanswered. Why so many cards from Germany and apparently no similar cases in other regions? Also, why send the cards to the repair service and not RMA them through the vendor? Not to mention that this case pops up immediately after AMD acknowledged the vapor chamber problem on some of the new RX 7900 XTX cards.

KrisFix is trying to gather more information on this problem and is asking for feedback from owners of RX 6800 / 6900 cards. There will be a follow-up video with whatever new information is gathered. Meanwhile, KrisFix is trying out different drivers for cards exhibiting the similar symptoms.

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