so the other day gigabyte sent over this behemoth rx 69 *cough cough*
50 xt and as you can see it has a magnificently ginormous cooler on it
and uh this graphics card has been driving me crazy since the moment i first took it out of
the box so what we're gonna do in today's video is i'm gonna walk you through the problem and then
how i try to diagnose it and then we're gonna talk about gigabytes response to the whole situation
now my initial plan for this video was to take the rx 6950xt and the rtx 3090 ti throwing
them in an arena dropping a knife on the floor and just kind of seeing what happened but then
when the 6950xt handily got its cheeks clapped at 1440p i was confused that's not supposed to happen
right especially with a game like battlefield 5 which really likes it some amd gpu so i went and
had a look at some reviews and realized that yeah my 6950xt shouldn't have been so easily
handled by the 3090ti and then after doing some digging the only metrics of how my card
was running that didn't make sense aside from the quite frankly crazy coil wine from the card
was the power draw figures you can see here in this tech power-up review with their sapphire
cards they were getting about 390 watts of power draw while gaming where i was seeing 290 watts
in fact that 290 watts was lower than what tech power up saw their 6900 xt drawing now you may
be thinking darwin clearly the sapphire car just has a particularly aggressive power draw
but tech powerup also reviewed the gigabyte version of the 6950xt and their gigabyte card
was drawing 390 watts the same goes for the review the tech testers did on their gigabyte
card more on that later actually but there's clearly something weird going on with my card
interestingly digital trends also got a gigabyte 6950 xt and they were reporting the same max power
draw of 290 watts that i was seeing on my card and they were also having weirdly low performance so
it seems like my gigabyte card isn't the only one suffering from malnutrition so having had
a brief look at the problem let's check in with past david to see how he tried to fix the problem
now i've tried a couple of things with this graphics card so far i've tried
three different driver versions ddu wiping in between installs that didn't have an effect
i also tried switching between the different bios on the graphics card both the bios actually behave
exactly the same which is pretty weird i've even reinstalled the firmware on the graphics card
using gigabyte's firmware installer that didn't help either i also played around with pretty
much every power setting i could find in the drivers and nothing's really helped in fact when
i go to msi afterburner and pull the power draw slider all the way to the right i just get like
300 watts of power draw on the graphics card so even overclocking at quote unquote
hasn't really done anything now one thing that does concern me about what's going on here is
there's pretty bad coil whine on this graphics card worse than the 3090 ti had it's so bad
in fact that the power supply is screaming like a cat with its tail caught in the door
uh so the next thing that i'm gonna try and do is replace the power supply i don't think
it's going to help with the power draw issues but let's see what it does for the coil one
well that didn't make a difference
with a new power supply it still sounds like a geiger counter near the elephant's foot
and it's not really helped our power draw figures not that i thought it would uh but it's really
weird because the back plate gets scorching hot but if you check all of the temperatures
they all seem normal and it's not like it's behaving like it's throttling right it goes
straight to 290 watts and then it just sits there so i don't know i think i'm
gonna have to get a different bios for this card otherwise we're we're stuck
good news i found a video by an awesome tech channel called tech testers where they also look
at one of these gigabyte rx 6950xt cards although this was behaving a lot more in line
with what you'd expect they were getting about 380 watts of power draw as opposed to the 280
of mine so i reached out to tech testers and i was like please can you send me the bios on your card
so that i can flash it on here and see what it does and they very kindly did send it i
have it here so thank you very much tech testers i'll have that video linked in
the description below so if you want to go check it out it's down in the description
so yeah let's install this bios on here and see what it does
ah yes success and interestingly you can see that there are actually different bios versions
so let's see if this makes a difference a few moments later
wait why would that not have fixed it that's so weird i
i have no idea what's wrong with this graphics card uh let me let me try another bios let me
let me try again no that also didn't help i i am very quickly running out of ideas here
to be honest uh i think the only thing that i haven't tried yet is let's let's change the
test bed out let's put a different system in there see maybe maybe that does summon
okay well it's just launched in a completely different platform let's see what that does
and then my final idea was to just tear the graphics card down to see if there were any
obvious problems on the pcb but considering that there wasn't any throttling going on i
wasn't really hopeful and aside from the fact that the vapor chamber just
looked like a forensic team's wet dream with all of those fingerprints it just
looks like a really badass graphics card's pcb and with my untrained eye it looks fine
and after spending four days on this i couldn't really think of anything else to do so with
that i think it's time to quickly discuss what gigabyte had to say about this whole situation
now the final thing we need to talk about here is gigabyte's response to this whole situation
uh now i reached out to gigabyte the moment i identified there was something wrong in my eyes
with the graphics card and then my uh contact at gigabyte immediately responded with well that
does seem pretty weird i've reached out to hq in the meantime have you tried both the silent
and the oc bios's and which firmware version do you have on the graphics card they then got
back to me a bit later and they said i just had a call with hq and they just want to know which
driver version you were using for the testing and like i mentioned earlier in the video over
the course of the testing i used three different driver versions all of which behaved roughly the
same at which point my correspondent who again has been very helpful through this whole process
they kept responding to all of my badgering and stuff very politely so i really appreciate that
but they said that okay we're gonna need some time to figure out what's going on here so i
delayed the video to give them a bit more time but since then i've not really been able to get
any more information out of gigabyte i emailed my contact again this morning and i was like hey um
it's been four business days can you at least give me an indication of whether or not gigabyte
considers this behavior to be unusual or not is it outside of spec and uh they they couldn't do
that which is pretty weird like gigabyte you made the product surely you should immediately be able
to tell if it's behaving abnormally compared to what you intended it to do like what and that
means that as far as i'm concerned there are one of two things going on here either gigabyte meant
for their version of the 6950xt to just draw about 290 watts of power while gaming
and this card is working as intended which would be pretty stupid because if you look at benchmarks
of like a sapphire version of the 6950xt which draws about 390 watts of power while gaming
it barely outperforms the version that this card replaces the 6900 xd which means the 6950xt
is already a pointless product that you're paying an additional two hundred dollars for
you don't have any headroom to lose performance due to conservative power drop figures like yeah
so there's the one thing and then the other option is that there's something wrong with this graphics
card and gigabyte's not been able to figure out what it is yet which i'm kind of leaning towards
that considering that the tech testers card i mean they showed proper power draw figures for
their card and i again i really appreciate you sending over your bios because it kind of adds
to how weird this whole situation is like why did that different bios version not fix the power draw
on this card i i don't really know what's going on um but that is about as much information as i have
on the topic so thank you for watching let me know in the comment section down below what you think
of this whole situation i will do a follow-up video once gigabyte figures out what's going on
uh it'll either be a short or a full video depending on the scope of the situation
so check out for that and uh yeah until the next video thank you for watching bye
you