AMD RX 7900 XTX Vapor Chamber Woes

FOR A MONTH OR TWO, Nvidia was in the hot seat due to the melting 16-pin adapters on its RTX 4090 graphics cards.

- Jarred Walton

An investigation determined that the root cause was users failing to fully insert the plug into the receptacle. With a bit of wiggling, the connection could come loose and start arcing, causing the plastic around the socket to melt. As you can imagine, AMD was pleased with its decision not to use the 16-pin connector on its cards.

Several prominent people at AMD mocked Nvidia's snafu, with one proclaiming "We're going to kick Nvidia's ass!" Another tweeted an image of the dual 8-pin connectors on AMD's RX 7900 card with the text, "Stay safe this holiday season."

Egg, meet face. AMD has had to acknowledge that batches of its reference RX 7900 XTX cards have an even bigger problem: they are overheating, throttling, and underperforming. AMD has vowed to replace the faulty cards but, by all accounts, the problem with the reference XTX cards is more widespread than Nvidia's melting adapter.