Some back story.
At the beginning of 2022 I managed to purchase a Radeon RX 6600 XT for a decent price. It was a PowerColor Red Devil. I had been using a Nvidia 1060 card up to that point with absolutely no issues with my system. My system is a AMD 5600X running on a Gigabyte B550M Aorus Pro-P motherboard, memory DDR4-3600 using the XMP profile. Stable and nothing wrong, just wanted a new graphics card because I wanted something new. I hadn't used an AMD graphics card since the Radeon HD series cards, so it had been awhile. I uninstalled the Nvidia drivers from my system and then removed the old card and installed the new 6600 XT. I started the install of the Adrenalin drivers and during the part of the install where the screen would flicker everything went black and a few moments later my system rebooted. It did this twice more before presenting the boot recovery options. I recognized this sequence of events as BSODs that had occurred. Tried a number of options but could not get the system to boot correctly. In trying to recover the system I did some things that made it worse so decided to reinstall the OS. Since I was reinstalling I decided to install Windows 11 instead of 10 as I had been planning on upgrading anyway. Fresh install of Windows, I tried installing the Adrenalin drivers again and again had the BSOD reboot sequence kick off. Killed everything and reinstalled Windows 11 again. This time instead of installing the 21.12.1 drivers (latest at the time), I dropped back to the 21.11.3 driver. These drivers installed with no issues at all and I was able to continue setting up my system.
Where I am now:
Months down the line now in April 2022, I see a notice in the Radeon software console that there is an updated driver; 22.4.1. I decide that I would have it install the update, so that I am current. Install kicks off and part way through the install, system crashes and it is Deja Vu all over again. I'm able to get into safe mode and run the AMD removal tool, which allows me to get back into the system with basic drivers. Retried the install with the same result. Repeat this exercise using various solutions and fixes from the internet with no change in behavior. I even went so far as to buy and install a new 850W power supply (had a 600W) and new memory, with no change. After hours and hours of trying to get the latest driver versions from 2022 to install and work, I redownload the 21.11.3 driver and it installed flawlessly and my system is back running again.
The BSOD dumps always referenced an amdkmdag.sys file as the issue.
Whatever AMD has done with their drivers since November of 2021 is causing some kind of issue with my system. This is my first AMD graphics card (have always run AMD processors) in over 10 years and this experience will definitely be on my mind the next time I purchase a graphics card.
TLDR: for anyone experiencing issues with AMD graphics card drivers causing BSOD and crashing, particularly on install, try dropping back to the 21.11.3 driver from November 2021. It seems to be stable compared to drivers that have come after.
