Earlier this year, a story involving the AMD Radeon RX 6000 line circulated on social media and brought to light a mystery regarding the disappearance of a batch of Navi 21 models, which were discarded after being corroded catastrophically.
German electronics repair shop KrisFix.de received 61 broken or defective RX 6900/6800 family graphics cards and found that 48 of them suffered from physically cracked GPU silicon. In this way, the mystery may have been solved, pinning cryptocurrency mining and high humidity storage as the culprits.
The big speculation was in relation to the Radeon driver version being used by the damaged GPUs, questioning whether AMD had made some kind of coding error that would cause the destruction of the silicon.
The repair shop reckons that most if not all of the very new looking graphics cards it received were purchased by individual customers from a batch released by a former cryptominer. Maybe there was a local eBay or Facebook Marketplace ad selling them cheap.
According to KrisFix, these cards have likely been stored for a few weeks or months since GPU-based cryptomining became uneconomical. But the real problem was moisture, presented by the common symptom of chips breaking and coming out of the PCB..
The KrisFix workshop explains that when it receives electronics that have been improperly stored and may have been impacted by changes in climate, it usually opens and lets the devices dry and settle at room temperature. In other words, these cards would have worked fine immediately after decommissioning the crypto mines.
The case serves as a lesson for consumers, who should be aware of the used GPU market, the target of bargains and the creation of time bombs that reduce product durability.
