There is a YouTube channel that is operated by a repair shop based in Germany called KrisFix. KrisFix recently published a Youtube video about customer graphics cards. The shop has recently received several dozen AMD 6800 and 6900 series graphics cards that have failed with the same symptoms. Every card has a shorted socket rail, shorted memory rail, and a shorted memory controller rail. The underlying cause for these dead shorts on the card is that the GPU core itself is fractured. The silicon is cracked. This is certainly a bad situation for AMD and its customers who own these graphics cards. The damage looks exactly like a thermal issue but it isn’t really clear what is happening with these processors.
This short video posted by KrisFix was an effort to gather more information on what might be causing these failures. He does mention that the failures all happened after a driver update in December, but that doesn’t mean that the driver is causing the issue. On the contrary, it’s very unlikely that this is a driver issue at all. As things tend to do on the internet, speculation ran rampant. There was some vague speculation that this could be a driver issue, and it has now gone to the point where, “OMG, AMD drivers are killing graphics cards!”
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When AMD was contacted, the company was not prepared to make any official statement regarding the issue. However, it was indicated that they are investigating the issue and they do take it seriously. From their initial investigation, they have determined that the driver is not the problem. If this was a driver issue, there would be a LOT more failures going on all over the place. It’s not a driver issue.
On a more positive note, most of the cards that are failing are still covered under AMD’s two-year warranty if it was purchased directly from AMD. If the card was purchased from a board partner there may be additional applicable warranties. AMD has offered to take at least some if not all of the graphics cards back and either repair or replace them.
KrisFix has uploaded another video in which he seems to conclude that these are used second-hand video cards that were originally used in a cryptocurrency mining farm, and might be failing due to storage or usage issues.
AMD has tested the three most recent driver revisions. None of those revisions alter the power delivery or the hardware rails, so the company is confident that the drivers have nothing to do with the failures.
Please note – It now appears that this is not actually a problem with AMD graphics cards or with AMD drivers. KrisFix now believes that he received several used cards from a crypto mining farm that may have been mishandled or stored in high heat or very humid conditions.
Here are the KrisFix Youtube videos discussed in this post.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQDnwpc_k4E
Why did several dozen AMD 6000 series cards fail with the same symptoms?
https://youtu.be/8Ejlt-7-h9o
HERE is what we found, 150 hours of testing – AMD 6000 Series
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