After users complaints on forums and social media about their AMD cards burning out, AMD has announced that they will be issuing a fix for their latest Crimson drivers due to one very, very serious issue.
AMD’s official tweet this morning referenced something called “low fan speed reports”. Here’s the full line:
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 Graphics (@AMDRadeon) November 29, 2015
It’s possibly the softest way to phrase an issue that some users are blaming for having their cards burn out. In short, some AMD users are reporting that the latest Crimson software has reset the speed of their fans to 20% and locked them, resulting in the temperatures of their cards soaring to the point where the GPU quite literally fries itself.
“So, there is a bug with the new Crimson drivers that AMD released (not beta, final release) that lock your GPU fan speed and because of this, many users have reported playing for extended periods of time with their fans locked to 20%,” a post on the PC master race sub-reddit, with 800 comments, reads from one disaffected user.
A stickied post in the AMD sub-reddit advises users to turn the fan speed on auto in the OverDrive settings. “Yesterday after installing Crimson I was messing around with Overdrive when I reset the clocks and went to play some GTA, Luckily I was running afterburner to keep an eye on the temps because I noticed the GPU hit 87°c within 5 minutes of playing.”
“I checked the overdrive tab and realised the fan had been set to limit fan speed at 30% by default,” the post continues. Users on other forums have also reported fans being locked at other speeds, and others have noticed the issue occurring but been fortunate enough to not experience any dire issues.
An AMD representative posted on Overclockers UK that the manufacturer was investigating the issue and that the current workaround is to reinstall the Crimson drivers. “[Upon reinstallation] do not touch the fan speed setting in Global Overdrive within Crimson. This should leave the default setting and not cause this issue to occur,” the AMD rep advised.
According to AMD’s timeline, the hotfix should be out by tomorrow morning or the afternoon at the latest barring any further complications.
Comments
7 responses to “AMD Issuing Fix For Drivers Following Reports Of Locked Fan Speeds”
And this is why i avoid AMD like the plague.
To be fair Nvidia did the same thing with their 196.75 drivers. The reason I now avoid AMD cards is the stuttering I used to get with my 6950. Drove me mad trying to play Skyrim with that card.
Well to be fair 196.75 is actually 5 and a half years ago. It just shows that AMD is 5 years behind in terms of stable firmware updates which is an irony because it is true 🙁
Yeah, I can’t remember which Nvidia driver revision it was, but it made the card run at 100% even when it wasn’t doing anything.
I avoid AMD because I personally find framerates are, while not necessarily higher on competing nVidia options, nVidia’s are more consistent than AMD’s, possibly because AMD tend to push memory speeds etc where as nVidia seem to go for a more balanced approach to their card designs. (plus drivers lately, although AMD are narrowing the gap… a little)
It could obviously just be the array of cards that I’ve owned, but I’ve owned a couple from both teams, so that seems a little unlikely.
Edit: Should point out: nVidia’s 7000 series was a dud IMO and seemed to follow AMD’s example if we are to run with my theory. The 7000 series card I had was always hot and had inconsistent performance from title to title and exhibited far more, what I would call, AMD frame rate rollercoastering than I’d personally like. It eventually died an early death and I went AMD for my next card lol.
I had this same problem, except mine were stuck at 100%. I’m getting more and more disenfranchised with AMD every day.
Yeah. I went from a 7870 to a 970 and everything (User experience etc, not frame rates lol) has been smoother so far. Until my motherboard kicked the bucket for a presumably unrelated reason lol.
I’ve since set up an old pc with the 7870 for the time being and I must say, the AMD card/ brand isn’t perfect, but dat cost to performance value is undeniable.