Idle power usage Abnormally high power draw while at idle was observed with the Radeon RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX when using select high resolution, high refresh rate displays and when the GPU is decoding video.
ComputerBase discovered that the RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX drew a respective 71W and 80W when decoding and playing a
4K 60FPS
YouTube video compared to the 30W used by the RX 6900 XT for the same task. AMD acknowledged the issue and it was added to the list of known issues to be addressed with future updates to drivers and Radeon Adrenalin software. On December 22, 2022, Adrenalin Edition 22.12.2 was released and its RDNA 3-exclusive driver significantly reduced the GPU's power usage at idle and when decoding video.
Reference card temperature issues AMD's reference editions of the Radeon RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX have suffered from high temperatures of up to 109 °C on the GPU hot spot. AIB partner cards were confirmed to not be affected by this issue. The loud fans and thermal throttling on reference cards could have been as a result of poor contact between the reference cooler and the GPU chiplets.
HardwareLuxx instead considered that the direct die cooling used for the Navi 31 chiplets could be difficult due to uneven contact pressure across the seven dies even if they may look to be level. AMD issued a statement in December 2022 that it was investigating the issue. AMD said that the noisy fans and thermal throttling on reference cards were due to a manufacturing defect where there was an insufficient amount of water in vapor chambers. Affected cards would be replaced by AMD upon request. On January 6, 2023, Scott Herkelman, Senior Vice President & General Manager Graphics at AMD, said in an interview with
PCWorld that "you would see a small performance delta" if the GPU throttles at 110 °C during certain workloads. Some media outlets disagreed with statements made by Herkelman, such as how he said there was "a small performance delta" when 3 out of 4 affected RX 7900 XTX performed worse than a previous generation 6900 XT in the same test. Usually, the RX 7900 XTX performs approximately 30–60% better than a 6900 XT. == See also ==