Hi all,
Made an account just to share my experience with you, as i find it all a bit fishy, and it might help some users here.
first off, this is NOT intended to smear AMD in any way!! And, yes i fully understand this is a community forum and NOT an official AMD support Forum, But i like to think AMD staff swing by here occasionally.
- TL:DR version at end -
Purchased an RX580 Sapphire Nitro+ Special Edition in November 2018 (319€)
Sapphire NITRO+ RX 580 Special Edition Specs | TechPowerUp GPU Database
Great card, Loved it, No Complaints at all, Until...
Updated to the 19.1.1 drivers more or less when they came out and have been having weird issues ever since but about 4 days ago i started having some really bad crashing, Basically i would start a game and within 10 seconds or less the system would either blackscreen/artifact/glitch for a few seconds and then crash to Desktop giving the "Default Radeon WattMan settings have been restored due to unexpected system failure" error, or it would lock up the system requiring a shutdown with the power button.
The card became unusable as far as gaming is concerned, as for general PC use it was OK, although i did experience the same crash while watching Youtube in fullscreen, although this only occurred once or twice.
I tried all the fixes, trust me, spent nearly 2 days trying to figure it out!
-DDU's,
-New drivers
-Old drivers
-Drivers from the CD that came with the Card (17.x.x drivers)
-Wattman settings, fan curves, power settings etc...
-Full system reinstall (yes a full reinstall with a drive wipe, not that half baked "windows reset" crap.)
-Reflashed the BIOS (motherboard and GPU)
-Different power unit
-Different PCI slot
-Different Motherboard
All while DDU'ing in between each operation.
No Change.
After researching (here and reddit mostly) I found i'm not the only one having these issues, Although i could have waited for new drivers to see if this cured the issue, i had much doubt as i suspected my card had suffered some sort of permanent damage and i can only blame the drivers as my card died less than a month after installing the new drivers and I have never overclocked my card and it never got over 75 during gameplay, unless i was just unlucky and got a bad card or something, who knows...
Anyway the strange part... I RMA'd my card yesterday morning and it arrived at its destination later that night.
This afternoon i got an email basically telling me that I've received a full refund to my account. (which I indeed had)
This is strange because the refund period had already ran out and it said i would have to send it for repair under warranty and may have to wait a "while" ...obviously it was a nice surprise to get a full refund only 1 day after i sent it in.
Could this mean they are aware of issues with these cards/drivers? are they getting a whole bunch of RMA's for these things? makes me wonder a little bit as I've been seeing quite a few threads pop up lately regarding RX 5xx, 4xx, Vega etc.. cards experiencing similar problems.
Ordered myself a GTX1060 6GB with my refund as it was on offer with a free 240GB Kingston SSD, Great deal if you ask me and still have a few bucks left over. so it turned out to be a WIN WIN situation for me in the end.
I'm sorry for going over to team green but i have lost trust in AMD, i have pretty much been unable to game for 2 weeks now and when you only have maybe an hour or 2 a day to play it can be very frustrating, especially when the card is less than 4 months old.
I'm not saying you should all go rush to send your cards back, but maybe if your card is still in warranty and has started suffering similar issues it might be an idea to look into the process as it varies from marketplace to marketplace.
From my experience with this issue its not something that can be simply fixed with a driver update/rollback and will only get worse as my card seemingly died less than a month after installing the new drivers unless AMD do something quick.
All i'm saying is keep an eye on those warranty dates as you would be pretty bummed to find out your warranty ran out not long after you start getting serious problems like i had.
I will be sticking around to see how this whole driver fiasco pans out and good luck to anyone having similar issues, I hope that your AMD cards live long and happy lives and don't get to a point where they need RMA'ing anytime soon.
peace out
TLDR:
RMA'd my 4 month old RX580 8GB following crashing issues most likely caused by recent driver updates as the card had become unusable.
Sent it off yesterday morning and received a full refund today.
The weird thing is the card was out of refund period and I was told it had to be sent for repair under warranty and was advised that it might take a while, which is why i was surprised to get a full refund just 1 day after sending it in.
Definitely something going seriously wrong with AMD drivers lately as many threads have been popping up regarding crashing issues with related cards.
Might wanna check the dates on your warranties before your card bites the dust like mine did....Just sayin'
Strange is right. Did AMD want to go through any troubleshooting with you before they gave you a RMA number or did they just accept what you had already tried?
Hey Bearcat
Nope, they just asked for a brief description of the problem, which i told them was crashing in games with the Wattman error and that i have tried many things to fix it (drivers, different hardware etc..), They replied with a bar code to print out and put on the box.
Even today i see there are new threads regarding this issue
They clearly knew about the problem otherwise they would have tested it when you sent it in.
Nice that they just gave you a full refund.
Had a similar experience with my old MSI card which was DOA.
Contacted them for RMA on the Friday and received a replacement on the Monday before I had even got around to mailing the original card back.