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Update: AMD’s Crimson is causing fan issues, but a fix has been released

Jon Martindale
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Update 8:20AM 12/1/2015: AMD has updated the Radeon Crimson software driver, and the issue is reportedly fixed. You can download the new driver here.

Original text: AMD shook things up quite drastically last week when it introduced its long awaited Crimson driver update for its Radeon Graphics Cards. This retired the long-time Catalyst Control Centre and introduced a number of new features. However reports from early adopters have suggested there may be some issues with it affecting fan speeds – AMD has promised to rush a fix out to correct it.

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Graphics card fan speed isn’t something a lot of people think about because it’s usually automatically handled by your graphics driver back-end software. But is, of course, incredibly important. If your fan-speed is too high, it can generate unwanted noise, and if too low, it risks overheating and potentially damaging your graphics hardware.

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So the fact that the Crimson drivers have given some people an issue where the fan is set permanently to 100 percent, or won’t budge from much lower settings even at high-load, it’s really problematic.

AMD has said that it will be releasing a fix for this issue as soon as possible, specifically mentioning the problems faced by those with the lower-than-expected fan speeds. It did not however discuss the problems some have had with overactive fan speeds, so it’s not clear if that issue will also be addressed in the impending patch.

We are aware of low fan speed reports on select GPUs with Radeon Software Crimson Edition. We intend to publish a hotfix on Monday.

— AMD Radeon Graphics (@AMDRadeon) November 29, 2015

This whole incident is somewhat surprising. It’s been several generations of graphics cards since overheating issues were more common place, as cards are now designed to down-volt themselves in the case of an overheating issue. Efficiency gains have also reduced the risk of overheating. We’d also think that AMD would put its new driver software, which it seems proud of, under intense testing — it’s unfortunate a bug like this was able to squeeze through.

While the fix is said to be up for release later this day, the exact time frame is unknown. Until then, AMD encourages users experiencing problems to manually set fan speed in the Crimson software.

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Jon Martindale
Jon Martindale
Computing Coordinator
Jon Martindale is the Evergreen Coordinator for Computing, overseeing a team of writers addressing all the latest how to…
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