AMD Crimson drivers may lock fan at 20% > Hot 90C Card

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wvjohn
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AMD Crimson drivers may lock fan at 20% > Hot 90C Card

Post by wvjohn »

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/11/ ... deo-cards/

AMD announced its new Crimson drivers, replacing the Catalyst name and software, with great fanfare earlier this month. The first Crimson drivers are now out, and they appear to have a serious problem. There are widespread reports of cards overheating and perhaps even failing permanently.

It appears that the new driver is setting the video card fans to 20 percent and then leaving them there. Normally, the fan speed should increase as the GPU temperature goes up, but that is not happening with Crimson. Even during games and intensive workloads, the fans are sticking at 20 percent, allowing GPU temperatures to climb to more than 90° C. These high temperatures are causing poor performance due to thermal throttling, graphical glitches and crashes, and some users are reporting permanent hardware damage. Although the GPU itself throttles when it overheats, there's speculation that other components on the cards, such as the VRMs, can still be damaged.

AMD has acknowledged the fan speed issue and says that a hot fix will be published today. This is unlikely to be any great comfort to those whose cards have bitten the dust, and it makes for an inauspicious debut for AMD's new driver. This is, however, not a problem unique to AMD; in 2010, Nvidia published a driver update that had a similar fan controller issue that led to cards overheating and in some cases breaking entirely. Another Nvidia release in 2013 also yielded complaints of overheating and video card destruction.
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Err
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Post by Err »

Guru3D has the hotfix: http://www.guru3d.com/files-details/amd-radeon-software-crimson-15-11-hotfix.html

I know you can't test across all hardware configurations and brands of cards but QC testing on at least one of each series of card shouldn't be out of the question. Especially just after rebranding your drivers.
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normalicy
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Post by normalicy »

That explains a lot to me. I thought it was just Fallout 4, but I upgraded my drivers at the same time & suddenly started to get lock-ups. Had to pull my side panel off to get it to play.
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Shadow250
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Post by Shadow250 »

the new version works i just tested it.

edit: nix that now its stuck at 50% every time i boot up so i have to manually set it to auto.
seems like they could get it right
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