The RX 6000 series Owners' Club

[Butanding1987]

How did it happen?

My current 6800XT is dying with the ESD shock that it received last week.
It has bad stutter now. I think eventually it will completely die.

 

[turbogear]

@turbogear , Oh man, that's so messed up! Hope you get the replacement card asap. The warranty sticker thing does apply to me in my neck of the woods, temper with the stickers and you void the warranty. That's one of the reasons why I'd gotten a Nitro+ RX 6800, which was replaced by the Nitro+ RX 6900 XT.

Would have loved to try out an LC'ed RX 6800XT/6900XT but the warranty issue was the deciding factor....that, and my lack of confidence with regards to application of the thermal pads (not sure of thickness and size) and the overall uncertainty I feel with LC. Guess I'm too old skool, besides, I'm something of an old fart, and I sorta personify the old saying "you can't teach an old dog new tricks" .

I was unlucky this time.
I have been using LC on my cards since many Radeon generations and never had to return a card before because of warranty topic.

I may still do it on the new card but I will contact PowerColor to check their stand on changing solder paste.
My card that died is from XFX. If you read their USA warranty site, they allow changing the cooler but one should contact them directly before. I did not do that and in Germany they don't have direct RMA option.
You need to go through Shop where you bought it and the shop told me as sticker is broken warranty is lost.

 

[ratirt]

For us it does not make difference if it is black cooler or silver, we would have turned ours anyway to water cooling.
We will have black cooler sitting in the closet rather than a silver one.

I thought I may get it this new card that you mention from AMD. I was at AMD website at launch time and even before I can put it into basket it was gone.

My current 6800XT is dying with the ESD shock that it received last week.
It has bad stutter now. I think eventually it will completely die.
I was thinking to put original cooler on it and send it for repair. No chance for that as warranty void sticker is obviously missing as I had it under water cooler.
That is the risk one takes when one converts his GPU to water cooling that warranty would be void and if for some reason the card need to be returned then you are screwed.

Good that in USA now these sticker are not valid anymore.
In Germany they are still valid and seller told me I can keep the card no luck with warranty when sticker is not there and cooler was removed by me.

As no luck with repair and I need a new GPU. I ordered a new 6800XT Red Devil from Mindfactory.
Hopefully I will get it until next week.
It was supposed to arrive this week but the DHL idiots screwed up claiming my address does not exist and returned the card back to Mindfactory without trying second time to deliver it.
Mindfactory will send it again to me ones it is back at their place.
Sometime one has a very shitty week I have to say.

Dude. What did you do to the card? ESD shock why didn't you wear grounding band or something? Did you get carried away with the water block and set up while changing the cooler?
Man I only hope that's not the case and maybe there is some excessive force on the components and you can loosen it up a bit? I'd still try warranty and explain you put a water block etc. to preserve the cards life. If you get the new card, will the block you already have fit the red devil? Not likely.

 

[turbogear]

How did it happen?

I was filling the water loop as it was missing some liquid.
The computer was on.
Unlucky for me my 5 year old daughter was playing near me and she touched my arm and I had my hand touching the GPU.
Me, her and GPU got an ESD shock. The computer rebooted instantly.
Ever since that insident the GPU is stuttering in 3D applications.
It is like you press a puase botton for a fraction of a second.
In the clock sharts you see that memory and GPU clock drops down to a few MHz very briefly.

Usually I am very careful with ESD and discharge myself before touching components. When weather is cold outside and heaters are running sometimes we have humidity dropping inside my house to less than 40%. That was the case on that day. When humidity is low ESD is a problem especially if one is wearing shoes with plastic sole.
I usually wear ESD protection shoes when doing electronic work but sometimes one has just bad luck on a certain day and things go wrong.

 

[ratirt]

I was filling the water loop as it was missing some liquid.
The computer was on.
Unlucky for me my 5 year old daughter was playing near me and she touched my arm and I had my hand touching the GPU.
Me, her and GPU got an ESD shock. The computer rebooted instantly.
Ever since that insident the GPU is stuttering in 3D applications.
It is like you press a puase botton for a fraction of a second.
In the clock sharts you see that memory and GPU clock drops down to a few MHz very briefly.

Usually I am very careful with ESD and discharge myself before touching components. When weather is cold outside and heaters are running sometimes we have humidity dropping inside my house to less than 40%. That was the case on that day. When humidity is low ESD is a problem especially if one is wearing shoes with plastic sole.
I usually wear ESD protection shoes when doing electronic work but sometimes one has just bad luck on a certain day and things go wrong.

It doesn't have to be the card. If the card was in the computer and you touched the computer not the card. Have you seen Jayz video? They were doing the ESD Shocks on purpose to the computer. It restarted shut off and it was still working. Maybe you need to sit down and pull all parts out put it all back together. I would try it. Maybe it is not the card but something else?

 

[basco]

you can get the stickers of with a heat gun on low and softly push from beneath-try not to pull.
i use something like this:

 

[turbogear]

you can get the stickers of with a heat gun on low and softly push from beneath-try not to pull.

Actually I tried that when I took the card apart. I have hot gun and heated the stickers.
One went off without issue and I still have that intact. The other one has developed a crack.
According to seller if the sticket is cracked the warranty does not exis anymore.

 

[basco]

often they are the same on cheap cards even from other vendors

i know its not easy-takes a long time to get them off safely and i have shaking hands.

i too think the card should be good even after the esd-i really hope so for ya

 

[ratirt]

Actually I tried that when I took the card apart. I have hot gun and heated the stickers.
One went off without issue and I still have that intact. The other one has developed a crack.
According to seller if the sticket is cracked the warranty does not exis anymore.

Hold on. The seller should get the card and send it back for testing/repair. They are not fixing anything so they shouldn't say the warranty does not apply. The manufacturer decides if the warranty has been voided or not.

 

[turbogear]

It doesn't have to be the card. If the card was in the computer and you touched the computer not the card. Have you seen Jayz video? They were doing the ESD Shocks on purpose to the computer. It restarted shut off and it was still working. Maybe you need to sit down and pull all parts out put it all back together. I would try it. Maybe it is not the card but something else?

Already did that in the past days.
First suspension was power supply.
I took it out and put the one from my son inside my computer but did not help.
Then I took my GPU and put it into his computer and the problem went with the GPU to new computer so it should be the GPU.

 

[sepheronx]

Already did that in the past days.
First suspension was power supply.
I took it out and put the one from my son inside my computer but did not help.
Then I took my GPU and put it into his computer and the problem went with the GPU to new computer so it should be the GPU.

Are you sure it's the GPU itself and not AMD drivers?

My 6800xt was doing same thing till I had to force clock speeds.

If all is lost, RMA it.

 

[ratirt]

Already did that in the past days.
First suspension was power supply.
I took it out and put the one from my son inside my computer but did not help.
Then I took my GPU and put it into his computer and the problem went with the GPU to new computer so it should be the GPU.

I'm just saying, If you haven't ESD shocked the GPU while for example changing the cooler, but the shock happened while all components were in the computer, it doesn't necessarily mean the GPU is broken.
One time it happened to me and PSU was in fact damaged some how. Swapping it solved nothing. I struggled for a while with this and decided to reinstall windows. All problems were gone.
If I were you, I would try some stuff before blaming it all on the GPU just because you have stutter or glitches.

Are you sure it's the GPU itself and not AMD drivers?

My 6800xt was doing same thing till I had to force clock speeds.

If all is lost, RMA it.

Exactly. I wouldn't say it is GPU due to stutter in games. I would rather look for an issue to be 100% sure it's that. In my case it wasn't the GPU even though the computer behaved weird.

 

[turbogear]

Hold on. The seller should get the card and send it back for testing/repair. They are not fixing anything so they shouldn't say the warranty does not apply. The manufacturer decides if the warranty has been voided or not.

I am not too sure about that, but I have it on my mind to put the original cooler on it and put the stickers on screws and send it anyways to them.
In best case they will not notice the crack in the sticker and repair the card. In worst case I get it back and pay some money for them to post it to me.

I want to try it after I have the new GPU in my computer otherwise I have no running computer.
If I get lucky and they do repair it, I can always sell it.

 

[ratirt]

I am not too sure about that, but I have it on my mind to put the original cooler on it and put the stickers on screws and send it anyways to them.
In best case they will not notice the crack in the sticker and repair the card. In worst case I get it back and pay some money for them to post it to me.

I want to try it after I have the new GPU in my computer otherwise I have no running computer.
If I get lucky and they do repair it, I can always sell it.

Try finding the problem or confirming that this is the GPU for sure. It's hard for me to believe it is since the shock happened when the components were installed in the computer.
I would pull everything apart, put it all back together (maybe change some parts like PSU, ram etc.) and reinstall windows. Basically start from scratch and then try. No OC on any component. All stock and then give it a shot.

 

[turbogear]

Are you sure it's the GPU itself and not AMD drivers?

My 6800xt was doing same thing till I had to force clock speeds.

If all is lost, RMA it.

I am pretty sure it is not the driver.
I am running Time Spy very often. I had it run on that day as well before the incident and the was never a stutter in Time Spy.
I did it right away after the incident and noticed the very bad stutter.
Now I start Time Spy and every few minutes the benchmark is stuttering and GPU clock and memory frequency is dropiing.

Try finding the problem or confirming that this is the GPU for sure. It's hard for me to believe it is since the shock happened when the components were installed in the computer.
I would pull everything apart, put it all back together (maybe change some parts like PSU, ram etc.) and reinstall windows. Basically start from scratch and then try. No OC on any component. All stock and then give it a shot.

I did many things already, including going back to older bios on my board the one without the USB fix from AMD.

As I said, I moved the card to another computer. I did DDU on that computet before to remove all the NVIDIA drivers from that computer.
Installed the card and ran tests and stuttering moved to the new computer.
I also put my son's GPU on mine GTX 1070Ti and there was no stutter on mine for many hours of test.

 

[sepheronx]

I am pretty sure it is not the driver.
I am running Time Spy very often. I had it run on that day as well before the incident and the was never a stutter in Time Spy.
I did it right away after the incident and noticed the very bad stutter.
Now I start Time Spy and every few minutes the benchmark is stuttering and GPU clock and memory frequency is dropiing.

I'm sorry to hear that. Just give amd control panel adjustments first. If nothing, yeah, RMA. And also keep us updated including your RMA experience.

 

[ratirt]

I am pretty sure it is not the driver.
I am running Time Spy very often. I had it run on that day as well before the incident and the was never a stutter in Time Spy.
I did it right away after the incident and noticed the very bad stutter.
Now I start Time Spy and every few minutes the benchmark is stuttering and GPU clock and memory frequency is dropiing.


I did many things already, including going back to older bios on my board the one without the USB fix from AMD.

As I said, I moved the card to another computer. I did DDU on that computet before to remove all the NVIDIA drivers from that computer.
Installed the card and ran tests and stuttering moved to the new computer.
I also put my son's GPU on mine GTX 1070Ti and there was no stutter on mine for many hours of test.

You have to keep in mind that the 1070TI uses way less power. Sometimes it just doesn't make sense how components act in a system. If you are sure it's the GPU try RMA and call it a day.
BTW, how much did you pay for the Red Devil 6900XT? Curious what the price is now in Deutschland.

 

[Butanding1987]

I was filling the water loop as it was missing some liquid.
The computer was on.
Unlucky for me my 5 year old daughter was playing near me and she touched my arm and I had my hand touching the GPU.
Me, her and GPU got an ESD shock. The computer rebooted instantly.
Ever since that insident the GPU is stuttering in 3D applications.
It is like you press a puase botton for a fraction of a second.
In the clock sharts you see that memory and GPU clock drops down to a few MHz very briefly.

Usually I am very careful with ESD and discharge myself before touching components. When weather is cold outside and heaters are running sometimes we have humidity dropping inside my house to less than 40%. That was the case on that day. When humidity is low ESD is a problem especially if one is wearing shoes with plastic sole.
I usually wear ESD protection shoes when doing electronic work but sometimes one has just bad luck on a certain day and things go wrong.

Which part of the GPU were you touching? I mean, it's covered by the block and it even has a backplate. How could it have been damaged by that?

 

[turbogear]

You have to keep in mind that the 1070TI uses way less power. Sometimes it just doesn't make sense how components act in a system. If you are sure it's the GPU try RMA and call it a day.
BTW, how much did you pay for the Red Devil 6900XT? Curious what the price is now in Deutschland.

I did not order 6900XT but 6800XT Red Devil. It cost me 1299€.

Ones the new card arrives, that would be another test for the computer.
If I notice that there is still strange behavior with the new 6800XT then I will need to debug further but at the moment I am pretty sure it is my GPU that is effected.

My debugging so far leads me to believe that VRAM got the hit.
If the VRAM is at default frequency the stuttering is there but does not happen that frequently and if I increase it to 2050MHz the stuttering becomes more dominant. If I put it to 2100MHz where it was before the insident happened it stutters every 2 to 3 minute when running for example Furhmark you see lot of dips.
Before the incident, my VRAM was at 2100MHz for months and no stuttering.

I tried 6900XT Red Devil as you remember about 1.5 months ago and was not happy with it's performance advantage over 6800XT and returned that one at time. I would not ike to pay 1650€ for the 6900XT Red Devil for only small performance gain as headroom for OC is usually on 6800XT much better.

Which part of the GPU were you touching? I mean, it's covered by the block and it even has a backplate. How could it have been damaged by that?

The back plate on EK block is made out of Aluminum. There is no color on it. It is silver. My hand was touching it. There are no isolation plastic washers between backplate and PCB screw holes.
Around the screw holes on GPU if you look at the naked GPU there is a contact ring and I believe this is contacting the ground plane on the GPU.

EK-Quantum Vector RX 6800/6900 D-RGB - AMD Radeon Edition

EK-Quantum Vector RX 6800/6900 is a special edition 2nd generation Vector GPU water block from the EK® Quantum Line. It is made for graphics cards based on the latest AMD® RDNA2™ architecture. This water block fits most reference PCB designs of the Radeon RX 6800, RX 6800XT, and RX 6900 GPUs...

www.ekwb.com

 

[ratirt]

I did not order 6900XT but 6800XT Red Devil. It cost me 1299€.

Ones the new card arrives, that would be another test for the computer.
If I notice that there is still strange behavior with the new 6800XT then I will need to debug further but at the moment I am pretty sure it is my GPU that is effected.

My debugging so far leads me to believe that VRAM got the hit.
If the VRAM is at default frequency the stuttering is there but does not happen that frequently and if I increase it to 2050MHz the stuttering becomes more dominant. If I put it to 2100MHz where it was before the insident happened it stutters every 2 to 3 minute when running for example Furhmark you see lot of dips.
Before the incident, my VRAM was at 2100MHz for months and no stuttering.

I tried 6900XT Red Devil as you remember about 1.5 months ago and was not happy with it's performance advantage over 6800XT and returned that one at time. I would not ike to pay 1650€ for the 6900XT Red Devil for only small performance gain as headroom for OC is usually on 6800XT much better.

Oh the 6800xt. I got it wrong buddy. I thought you wanna pull all the stops and go 6900XT.
I remember you had a 6900Xt red devil but you were not satisfied with the performance.

Try stuff and find the problem but like I said before, It is hard for me to believe it is the card since all the components were in the computer connected and the shock (I assume) was to the case not specific component. When you say Vram it's specific and even more unbelievable but I won't judge. Maybe you are right but it would have been weird if that turned out to be true.

 

[turbogear]

Try stuff and find the problem but like I said before, It is hard for me to believe it is the card since all the components were in the computer connected and the shock (I assume) was to the case not specific component. When you say Vram it's specific and even more unbelievable but I won't judge. Maybe you are right but it would have been weird if that turned out to be true.

It could be some power supply component supplying VRAM as well.
Let's see. I will do further analysis on weekend and if I find something new I will let you know.

you can get the stickers of with a heat gun on low and softly push from beneath-try not to pull.
i use something like this:
View attachment 195910

Thank for the hint.
I did it with hot gun and a scalpel.
I got one sticker off very well but got a crack on the other sticker.
One sticker says AMD on it and the other one says XFX.
The XFX sticker is intakt but AMD one was really big and got a crack while removing.

 

[lowrider_05]

It could be some power supply component supplying VRAM as well.
Let's see. I will do further analysis on weekend and if I find something new I will let you know.

Hello, i would only like to remind you, since you live in Germany, that you need to remind the Shop were you bought the GPU from, that you send the Card back under "Gewährleistung" and not Warrenty because all the Manufacturers policies don´t apply to this. If the GPU is under 6 Months old, just say it does not work anymore and you don´t know why, because they then have to prove that you killed the card or well, repair/exchange it for you.

maybe that helps.

 

[turbogear]

Hello, i would only like to remind you, since you live in Germany, that you need to remind the Shop were you bought the GPU from, that you send the Card back under "Gewährleistung" and not Warrenty because all the Manufacturers policies don´t apply to this. If the GPU is under 6 Months old, just say it does not work anymore and you don´t know why, because they then have to prove that you killed the card or well, repair/exchange it for you.

maybe that helps.

Thanks for the hint I will try to play ignorant and send the card back as malfunctioning hardware and don't know what has happened.
I will put warranty stickers back and if I am lucky they will not complain about the crack.

The card is less than 6 months old.

 

[Felix123BU]

@turbogear , Oh man, that's so messed up! Hope you get the replacement card asap. The warranty sticker thing does apply to me in my neck of the woods, temper with the stickers and you void the warranty. That's one of the reasons why I'd gotten a Nitro+ RX 6800, which was replaced by the Nitro+ RX 6900 XT.

Would have loved to try out an LC'ed RX 6800XT/6900XT but the warranty issue was the deciding factor....that, and my lack of confidence with regards to application of the thermal pads (not sure of thickness and size) and the overall uncertainty I feel with LC. Guess I'm too old skool, besides, I'm something of an old fart, and I sorta personify the old saying "you can't teach an old dog new tricks" .

You could classify me also as some sort of an older fart and also reasonably conservative, and after maaany years I went full LC for the first time, not only was it lots of fun but the whole thing is cooler and quieter. In conclusion, you just need to find the right treat for an old dog to make him learn new tricks

 

[sepheronx]

lol, I think my 6800xt is being bottlenecked by my 10500ES

OC (Mem: 2040 Core: 2400)