r/Amd

We also CT scanned it.

Hey r/Amd,

I just wanted to share a very positive experience I recently had with AMD's customer service and express my gratitude.

My Ryzen 9 7950X3D unfortunately died on me recently. The incredibly frustrating part was that this happened exactly one month after the 3-year warranty had expired. Considering I paid around 800€ for it back in the day, I was pretty devastated. For context, I always ran the CPU completely stock (I never touched any settings or overclocked it) and had it paired with an ASUS TUF Gaming B650-Plus motherboard.

I decided to contact AMD support anyway, just to see if there was anything they could do. To my absolute surprise, they replaced the CPU completely hassle-free, even though it was technically already out of warranty (I opened the claim 2 months after the warranty end, as I first had to figure out it was the CPU which died).

I am incredibly thankful for this amazing level of customer support. It’s rare to see a company accommodate their customers like this when they technically don't have to anymore. Just wanted to put this out there and give credit where credit is due.

Thank you, AMD!

Hey everyone,

If you are running an RX 6800 XT (specifically the Sapphire Nitro+ or any other high factory-overclock card) and constantly getting Driver Timeout crashes in PUBG, updating your drivers won't help. Even on the latest current drivers, the game keeps crashing.

The real issue is a combination of Windows MPO conflicts, aggressive factory boost clocks causing voltage spikes, and the unstable AMD Adrenalin background software.

Here is the exact, complete method I used to permanently fix this and make the game buttery smooth:

1. Clean "Driver-Only" Installation (No Adrenalin)

• Download DDU (Display Driver Uninstaller) and your AMD driver package. (Driver version doesn't matter, even the latest one works with this method).
• Disconnect internet, boot into Safe Mode, and run DDU to completely wipe old drivers.
• Reboot, run the AMD installer, but CRITICAL STEP: Under "Install Type", select Driver Only. Do NOT install the Adrenalin Edition software. It is completely useless for stability and causes conflicts here.

2. Registry Tweaks (MPO & TDR Fix)

We need to manually disable Multi-Plane Overlay (MPO) and give Windows more time to respond to RDNA2 voltage fluctuations. Open your Registry Editor (regedit) and apply these changes:

• Disable MPO: Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Dwm. Create a new REG_DWORD (32-bit) called OverlayTestMode and set its value to 5 (hexadecimal).
• TDR Delay Fix: Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\GraphicsDrivers. Create a new REG_DWORD (32-bit) called TdrDelay and set its value to 60 (decimal). This stops Windows from aggressively resetting your driver during brief spikes.
• Disable AMD Crash Reporter: Go to Windows Services (services.msc), find AMD Crash Defender Service (or AMD Crash Reporter), stop it, and change its Startup Type to Disabled.

3. PUBG In-Game Settings

• Go to Graphics settings and change the API to Standard DX11.
• Do not use DX12 or DX11 Enhanced.

4. MSI Afterburner Tuning (The Core Clock Fix)

Since we don't have Adrenalin, we will use MSI Afterburner to stabilize the card's frequencies via the voltage curve editor (Ctrl + F).

• Lower the Max Frequency: Set your maximum core clock 100 MHz lower than your card's stock advertised maximum boost. For my Sapphire Nitro+, the stock max boost was 2364 MHz, so I capped it at 2260 MHz.
• Undervolt: Slightly drop your core voltage by about 75 mV using the curve editor (e.g., if your stock voltage is 1153 mV, drop it by 75 mV). This prevents the aggressive power spikes that trigger timeouts on heavy factory-OC models.
• Apply, save the profile, and set Afterburner to start with Windows.

This completely eliminated 100% of my crashes. No more driver timeouts, no more freezes. Let me know if this mega-fix works for you! 🍻

One of our servers had been throwing weird memory allocation, memory access and execution errors on a Linux box we were running.

All of it got fixed however, after we disabled one of its physical cores, which was weird, right? Why did disabling one core fix such an odd mix of errors?

So we decided to replace the whole CPU despite only having lost 1 of its 32 cores.

What we discovered, after removing its cooler however, utterly shocked us.

The CPU had literally melted the aluminum layer of its heat-spreader in two spots, suggesting there must have been some kind of a short circuit in one of the cores, or some other kind of a hardware issue.

In all of my 8+ years of working in IT, I have never seen a thing like this.

An AMD EPYC 7513, with two spots of copper showing through the aluminum layer of the heat-spreader