If you’ve bought the latest AMD Ryzen gear and their latest X570/B550 motherboards over the last six months, chances are you might have noticed some odd behaviour with your USB ports. Users have been reporting some real weird behaviour, ranging from USB devices disconnecting, audio stuttering and crackling, webcams glitching, and other bizarre drama. Months after all the reports landed, AMD has finally confirmed there is an issue — they’re just not entirely sure what it is.
The problems got so bad that users do what users do when there seems to be a collective problem: They built a spreadsheet. And while some users found various workarounds, including forcing the BIOS to run their flash new Radeon RX 6000 or GeForce RTX 3000 series graphics cards in PCIe 3.0 mode (instead of PCIe 4.0), tweaking Windows’ power management settings, or disabling C-states in the BIOS.
But the best update, ultimately, is for AMD to fix it all. And the chip manufacturer has finally acknowledged that there’s a problem, but to actually fix it, they need more help.
“AMD is aware of reports that a small number of users are experiencing intermittent USB connectivity issues reported on 500 Series chipsets. We have been analysing the root cause and at this time, we would like to request the community’s assistance with a small selection of additional hardware configurations,” the official AMD Reddit account posted.
“Over the next few days, some r/Amd users may be contacted directly by an AMD representative (u/AMDOfficial) via Reddit’s PM system with a request for more information.” Any users not contacted directly should get in touch with AMD via their online customer support, the account added.
The issue has reportedly been most prominent among VR owners, although audio crackling (with or without external sound devices/DACs) seems to be a consistent problem too.
The bigger worry is whether AMD can resolve all of these fixes with a BIOS/firmware/chipset update. Putting the annoyance of not being able to use PCIe 4.0 on your new PCIe 4.0 GPU aside, having your USB devices drop out in the middle of a game, having your webcam drop out mid-call, Bluetooth devices losing connectivity, unexplainable lag spikes while streaming or gaming, VR tracking issues and your sound occasionally going super quiet or way too goddamn loud is a titanic pain in the arse that nobody should have to live with.
So hopefully AMD can work this out with a simple update and not something a lot more extreme (like a motherboard recall). The motherboard is the one thing in your PC you really don’t want to have to replace, just because everything else is connected to it. But whatever the permanent solution ends up being, we’ll keep you posted. The latest AMD gear is still really, really good — but I wouldn’t blame anyone for holding off until there’s a proper fix for this.
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