Turn the “OOOPH” dial up to 11 because AMD are just not having a good start to the year. With some not-so-great news that their new 7900 XTX cards were suffering from temperature issues kicking things off, there are now rumours that the latest WHQL 22.11.2 driver could be the cause for the RX 6000 series bricking.
A Germain repair shop, KrisFix, reported on his YouTube channel that over the last 3 weeks, he has received 61 RX 6000 series cards in for repair and of that batch 48 of them have a broken GPU chip. This is bad news for the GPU owner as it’s completely irreparable. When this chip goes, the whole GPU becomes a DIY project that you take apart and put into a frame for your bar.
Personally, I would usually brush this “news” off as some sort of fear-mongering, but with the state of things these days; GPU Prices are through the roof causing us gamers to opt for last-gen cards, saving up for months and months to finally get ourselves an upgrade and load shedding just popping electrical equipment like it’s a microwave sending its invisible army to attack a bowl of innocent corn kernels, I thought that it would only be fair to you guys to, at the very least, send out a warning.
As KrisFix said in his video, he hasn’t been able to confirm or deny that it is actually the driver updating causing this to happen, it could be a batch of faulty cards from the supplier, but with almost 80% of the cards he has received with the exact same problem and the driver being the only common thing between them, it’s hard not to point fingers.
Take this news with a pinch of salt, but also, rather be safe than sorry. If I were running at RX 6000 card, I would try to roll back my drivers until I see some confirmation of this being just another thing Trump accidentally tweeted.