AMD has encountered some unlucky points with mounting stress on a few of its Finest GPUs up to now. Nonetheless, a brand new report from Igor’s Lab found an analogous downside with AMD’s new Radeon Professional W7600 single-slot graphics card that’s a lot worse, main to finish blackouts from the GPU.
The signs started when Igor examined AMD’s new single-slot W7600 for a evaluation. He discovered that testing the cardboard for lower than 6 minutes underneath Lightwave, Horizon Zero Daybreak or Furmark would trigger the GPU to cease producing a picture to the monitor altogether — inflicting the display to blackout. This occurred despite the fact that the cardboard’s PCB, reminiscence, and GPU temperatures had been being reported inside their specified limits (albeit on the increased finish of these limits).
It turns on the market was a significant issue with the thermal pads AMD put in on the Radeon Professional W7600. Igor found that the thermal pads protecting the 4 GDDR6 reminiscence modules had been too thick and too arduous, ensuing within the single-slot vapor camber tilting on the GPU die and stopping the GPU die from making excellent contact with the vapor chamber cooler.
To make issues worse, AMD didn’t add extra spacers to the W7600 to counter the mounting stress from the extra-thick reminiscence pads. The W7600’s 4 GDDR6 reminiscence modules sit proper subsequent to the GPU die, on the highest and proper sides, forcing all of the contact stress from the pads to take a seat on one aspect of the cardboard. Spacers are a standard observe within the shopper GPU house to make sure that GPU mounting stress stays enough throughout all die areas.
AMD additionally didn’t present direct contact from the heatsink to the W7600’s mid-plate sandwiched between the PCB and the cooler. Doing this traps warmth in and across the reminiscence modules since they and their related thermal pads are immediately linked to the mid-plate.
You are alleged to make cutouts for the GDDR6 reminiscence modules in order that the thermal pads can immediately contact the cooler, bypassing the mid-plate altogether. Or, you join the mid-plate to the cooler with thermal pads or a mixture of thermally conductive metals paired with thermal pads.
To repair the difficulty, all Igor did was substitute the GDDR6 reminiscence pads with barely thinner and softer 0.5mm pads to cut back the appropriate and top-most mounting stress, apply two extra pads on the alternative sides of the GDDR6 reminiscence modules to stabilize the cooler, and use extra thermal paste connecting the heatsink to the mid-plate. Because of this, the mid-plate now has direct contact with the heatsink, permitting all the warmth generated from the reminiscence ICs to be transferred immediately into the heatsink.
It is shocking to see such mediocre craftsmanship from AMD, particularly on a card designed for the workstation market. Normally, workstation playing cards are held to increased manufacturing requirements than gaming playing cards attributable to their goal. However this is not the primary time we have seen cooling issues like this from AMD. An analogous concern was additionally current on AMD’s reference RX 7900 XTX graphics card, which triggered GPU hotspot temps to spike as excessive as 110C despite the fact that the GPU core is likely to be sitting as little as 50-60C.
For now, Igor appears to be the one one with this concern, however we don’t doubt that extra folks may have related points down the street as the cardboard ages. Hopefully, AMD will rectify the issue shortly with one other revision of the Professional W7600 within the close to future.