AMD has confirmed that it is indeed the faulty vapor chamber that is causing the hotspot overheating problem on its new $1,000 Radeon RX 7900 XTX (opens in new tab) board.

According to PC World's Gordon Mah Ung (opens in new tab), AMD's Scott Herkelman explained that the problem affects only the 7900 XTX board and "Made by AMD" cards, not AIB designed products.

Herkelman said that AMD responded as soon as they first heard reports of some cards running at higher than expected temperatures.

"We took action immediately," Herkelman said. 'First of all, do we have any safety concerns? There are no safety concerns. And then we found that there was a slight delta in performance when the temperature exceeded 110 degrees under certain workloads."

"We were able to get the temperature to a level that would allow us to get the temperature to the next level," Herkelman says.

AMD then set about "getting to the root cause" of the problem, a process that, according to Herkelman, took two weeks.

"In the end, it comes down to a small batch of vapor chambers that don't have enough water. It's a very small portion," he claims.

From here, AMD says its top priority is to make sure customers get a fully functional replacement card as soon as possible. 'The person who purchased this XTX board spent a lot of money,' he says. We want to fix it for you. If you purchased it from AMD.com, call our tech support line. We will immediately ship you a unit that is verified as good."

As we reported a few days ago (opens in new tab), AMD seems to have dragged its feet when customers inquired about hotspot issues. Of course, it must be difficult to rule out the usual Internet disturbances from real, practical problems. But our overall feeling is that AMD could have responded sooner. After all, we are talking about people spending $1,000 on a brand new GPU. [Of course, AMD is not the only company having problems with these new high-end GPUs; Nvidia's RTX 40 series has an unfortunate tale of a power connector melting. What an untenable trend.