AMD RX6000 series cracked dies and blown voltage rails after December driver update?

[Grim5]

Does anyone here have this issue?

A German repair shop says they've in the last couple weeks received 61 RX6000 GPUs for repair and all of them had blown voltage rails or cracks in the GPU die. Users claim they were gaming, idle or watching YouTube when it died, all cards seem to be using the latest December 2022 drivers

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1612868725128019968

 

[Grim5]

Seems like a logical explanation.

It no longer works, if you try to download that driver now it will not install if you don't have a rx7000 GPU in your system. But perhaps for a very short period, like maybe one day or few hours the driver file on there did not have this hardware check and people were able to install RDNA3 drivers to control their rdna2 GPU and now AMD has replaced the file

Drivers have killed GPUs before, ask Nvidia. And even windows apps have killed GPUs before

 

[Grim5]

No doubt this will go down as another reason people always say AMD have bad drivers... even though we all know it can't be the drivers causing this.

No we don't known

 

[Grim5]

Why is mining cracking amd GPUs and not Nvidia though

Does that mean no one should ever buy 2nd hand amd GPU anymore due to cracking risk? Blaming this on mining is a easy answer to a question but it creates another bigger question; which means it's not safe to buy 2nd hand AMD GPUs

 

[Grim5]

Yeah not even gonna click on that video, Jay is trying to beat a dead horse this late

 

[Grim5]

The issue has already been solved, calm down guys

The repair guy managed to dig out what happened from the owners.

Turns out that while all GPU had the same failure mechanism and used the same drivers; what they didn't know and now they do is that all owners had recently purchased the 6800/6900xt and all the purchases were done online from the same seller and this seller had been using the GPUs to mine with.

This is also why the GPUs ended up at a repair shop and not RMA with AMD, the seller did not provide receipts with the GPU and in any case mining voids the warranty on any gpu

 

[Grim5]

We still don't know what the miner did to these cards

Mining shouldn't just kill a whole batch like that nor should it cause all cards to fail at once

The miner may have done something stupid before selling the cards and reassembling.

Maybe the cards were cleaned with a water blaster or something - it has been seen before