After Roasting Nvidia For Overheating Issues AMD Now Has Its Own

AMD may have spoken too soon when it roasted Nvidia a couple months ago over the melting cable issue of the rival GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards.

That's because the Ryzen-shine designer is now faced with multiple reports of an overheating issue with its own reference design for its new Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics card.

AMD acknowledged the situation on Wednesday and said it's "working to determine the root cause" of an "unexpected throttling" in GPU performance, which it believes is related to an issue with the thermal solution used in AMD's reference model for the RX 7900 XTX. Custom RX 7900 XTX cards made by add-in-board partners like XFX and Gigabyte aren't impacted.

The chip designer added that the "issue appears to be present in a limited number of the cards sold" and that it's "committed to solve this issue for impacted cards." The company encourages impacted users to contact AMD's support team.

It's unclear what constitutes a "limited number" for AMD, but a source told German hardware testing site Igor's Lab that "thousands of graphics cards" could be impacted by the overheating issue. AMD did not respond by press time to a request for clarification on how many cards may have this issue.

• Nvidia revives canceled RTX 4080 as 'new' 12GB RTX 4070 TI
• Creator of spec for melting RTX 4090 cables urges Nvidia, others to 'ensure user safety'
• Nvidia faces lawsuit for melting RTX 4090 cables as AMD has a laugh
• AMD's latest, greatest Radeon graphics card $600 cheaper than Nvidia's top RTX 4090

Igor's Lab was among those who verified the overheating issue in the Radeon RX 7900 XTX reference card and found that its temperature reached up to 110 degrees Celsius, which the site said is "well above the permissible temperature limit."

AMD launched the 24GB Radeon RX 7900 XTX as its new flagship graphics card alongside the 20GB Radeon RX 7900 XT last month with suggested retail prices of $999 and $899, respectively.

A month before the launch, AMD's senior director of gaming marketing, Sasa Marinkovic, made a not-so-subtle jab at Nvidia for the melting cable issue with the rival's GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards that had been reported by several users.

"Stay safe this holiday season," Marinkovic wrote on Twitter, attaching an image of the dual 8-pin connector design of AMD's new Radeon RX 7900 products.

Nvidia has said it believes the RTX 4090's 16-pin 12VHPWR connector is melting because users are not fully plugging it into the card. However, the consortium that created the specification for the 12VHPWR connector said it's the responsibility of GPU vendors like Nvidia to "ensure user safety."

The GeForce designer is now facing a lawsuit seeking class-action status that accuses Nvidia of misleading consumers over the safety of RTX 4090 graphics cards due to the melting cable issue.

It may have been fun for AMD to poke fun at its rival at the time, but now the company has its own issues to sort out. ®