AMD’s new Crimson drivers accused of burning up video cards

AMD announced its new Crimson drivers, replacing the Catalyst name and software, with great fanfare earlier this month. The first Crimson drivers are now out, and they appear to have a serious problem. There are widespread reports of cards overheating and perhaps even failing permanently.

It appears that the new driver is setting the video card fans to 20 percent and then leaving them there. Normally, the fan speed should increase as the GPU temperature goes up, but that is not happening with Crimson. Even during games and intensive workloads, the fans are sticking at 20 percent, allowing GPU temperatures to climb to more than 90° C. These high temperatures are causing poor performance due to thermal throttling, graphical glitches and crashes, and some users are reporting permanent hardware damage. Although the GPU itself throttles when it overheats, there's speculation that other components on the cards, such as the VRMs, can still be damaged.

AMD has acknowledged the fan speed issue and says that a hot fix will be published today. This is unlikely to be any great comfort to those whose cards have bitten the dust, and it makes for an inauspicious debut for AMD's new driver. This is, however, not a problem unique to AMD; in 2010, Nvidia published a driver update that had a similar fan controller issue that led to cards overheating and in some cases breaking entirely. Another Nvidia release in 2013 also yielded complaints of overheating and video card destruction.