Perhaps the secret of the too high temperature of the hot spot on Radeon RX 7900 graphics cards has been solved.

Enthusiast Igor Wallossek, known for his website Igors Lab, decided to investigate the problem on his own and took it very seriously. It took him almost two weeks to get it to work, but it’s not just some set of tests or trying to replace the thermal paste.

At the disposal of the source was only the reference Radeon RX 7900 XT. Additionally, Vallossek points out that the problem he ended up finding on his graphics card could be an instance-specific issue, meaning that the solution can’t be applied to all cards in this case. On the other hand, the solution was indeed found.

So Vallossek dismantled his 3D map, documenting everything carefully. Among other things, he scanned both the card and the cooling system on a 3D scanner, which in the end took him 12 days.

The whole process and all the nuances are described in more detail in the original article, but we will give only the main ones. The main problem, which, however, lies in several places at once, is the poor and uneven pressure of the evaporation chamber of the cooling system to the GPU. Even in the photo you can see that the thermal paste is unevenly distributed, and the scan showed that the GPU is indeed slightly concave. True, the difference is only 0.07 mm, which in itself will not lead to a huge difference between the average temperature and the temperature of the hottest spot. In the case of Vallossek’s map, the difference reached 45 degrees!

However, it wasn’t just the GPU that was uneven. The contact pad of the cooler is also imperfect. Here, too, the irregularities themselves are not critical, but they are already superimposed on the irregularities of the GPU. As a result, only these two factors lead to gaps up to 0.11 mm, and this is already a lot. However, this can be compensated for with a good and correct thermal paste.

The thing is, that’s not all. The final touch is the mounting system. Not only does it have drawbacks in AMD coolers, but in this case, the big problem is that the cooler simply cannot be pressed well enough against the GPU. The screws do not allow this due to their design, which is correct, since it is almost impossible to damage the GPU with such screws, but here they are simply too short.

As a result, Vallossek replaced the thermal paste with Alphacool Apex B-Stock, supplemented the CO mount with two washers and other screws, and as a result, the difference between the average GPU temperature and the hottest point decreased from 45 degrees to 15-17 degrees, that is, three times!

Vallossek at the end of the article notes once again that so far he can only confidently say that his particular copy of the Radeon RX 7900 XT suffers from the problems indicated in the article and they can be solved in this way, but so far it cannot be argued that it is in the nuances found that the reason lies high heating problems of all new AMD products.