As proponents of modern and proficient software suites, delivering functionality that is sleek, feature-rich and user honed, we were quick to yell the launch of AMD’s Radeon Software Crimson Edition from the rooftops.
If only their new graphics card software package didn’t burn out the cards of those using it.
That’s because Crimson Edition has reportedly been locking the fan speeds of many a card, ranging from the HD 7000 series to the 3XX cards, at 20%.
We don’t need to point out that at that speed it doesn’t take long for cards already reaching 80 and 90 degrees to burn out.
Of course, modern cards are supposed to throttle themselves to prevent that very thing, but that’s not happening according to a number of unhappy customers.
We are aware of low fan speed reports on select GPUs with Radeon Software Crimson Edition. We intend to publish a hotfix on Monday.
— AMD Radeon (@AMDRadeon) November 29, 2015
Hotfix is right.
As you can see above, AMD is clearly aware of the issue with their software suite and plans to address it as soon as possible. Rather unfortunately, they haven’t acknowledged the implications of the fault, nor what they plan to do about it.
In fact, they’ve yet to reply to anyone reporting a burnt out card, many of whom can’t understand how a bug like that slipped through – a great question indeed.
Radeon Software Crimson Edition is supposed to be the next chapter in the Radeon GPU experience, so you’d think they’d more thoroughly test the drivers before releasing them.
We doubt that it’s part of a secret plot by AMD to force their customer base to purchase their newer cards, as some are suggesting.
We’re not sure about you but if that had happened to us, we’d very quickly jump ship to NVIDIA – the grass being greener (get it) on that side.
It’s not a great plan to push their newer cards, is all we’re saying.
In other GPU news
Their mightiest card yet: AMD to launch R9 Fury X2 in December
NVIDIA allegedly preparing the GTX 960 Ti to fill gap between GTX 960 and GTX 970
AMD unveils Radeon R9 380X: for those who can’t quite afford a GTX 970
NVIDIA confirms Pascal has 16GB of HBM2 memory and 1TB/s bandwidth
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I guess this is an issue if you leave the fan profile stock. I’ve found that the fan was always locked to low in previous drivers for my liking, I set mine to 80% fan max with an 85c temp target. Keeps the turbine fan noise acceptable and temps reasonable
I’m pretty surprised that the thermal cut off doesn’t stop the card from killing itself, I would have expected it to have throttled back to hell and gone to keep those temps acceptable, which was my experience when I first got my R9 290 before I changed the fan profile