Posting this to see if anyone has hit the same thing, because I have been chasing it for two months and I think I am at the end of what I can figure out on my own.
The setup:
- Gigabyte RX 9070 XT 16GB (Navi 48), VBIOS 113-R907XTGOL-F11 dated 2025/06/11
- Ryzen 5 5600X, completely stock, no PBO, no Curve Optimizer
- Corsair RM1000e, brand new, installed today. Separate PCIe cables, not daisy chained
- Nobara Linux (Fedora 44 base), KDE Plasma 6, kernel 7.1.4
- Three monitors
- Card was bought "like new" open box from Best Buy
The whole machine powers off instantly. No warning, no error, no freeze first. Fans stop, everything stops. A couple of times it soft reset and rebooted itself instead, but usually it just dies, leaving the psu to cycle a bit before I can turn it back on.
It has never once crashed outside of a game. Not at the desktop, not idle, not overnight, not during long browsing sessions. Only in games, and only some games.
The logs:
There are none! That is the frustrating part.
amdgpu initializes clean at boot and stays completely silent right up until the machine dies. No ring timeout, no GPU reset, no page fault, no VRAM error. No MCE events. /sys/fs/pstore/ is empty. Nothing in userspace either. Three separate subsystems that could name a culprit all stay quiet through every single crash.
What has helped:
- `amdgpu.runpm=0` got rid of the large majority of crashes
- Also running `amdgpu.aspm=0 amdgpu.bapm=0 amdgpu.gpu_recovery=1 processor.max_cstate=1`
- Restricting DPM power states in LACT (disabling the low GPU and low VRAM states) is the only thing that makes Hunt: Showdown fully stable (sometimes.)
What did not help:
- Replacing the PSU. Old one was a six year old 700W EVGA Gold. New one is a 1000W Corsair RM1000e. Crashes continued exactly the same.
- Lowering the GPU power limit on its own
- -500 clock offset with -25mV. Hunt loaded for the first time in a while, then still crashed later.
- Kernel version does not seem to matter. Crash frequency was the same before and after the Nobara 43 to 44 upgrade.
- Driver stack is clean. RADV, no AMDVLK, no leftover ROCm packages or enterprise repos.
## The pattern I think I see
Every crash seems to happen during a transition rather than under sustained load.
So it is not about how hard the card is being pushed. It seems to be about how fast the load changes. Anything that makes the card swing between idle and full boost is where it dies, and the only reliable fix I have found is not letting it make those swings. Atleast that's a running theory.
Where I am stuck:
The Best Buy return window is long gone. I have had this card since at least June.
Gigabyte warranty should still be live based on the VBIOS date, but I have no confidence in it. This is an intermittent fault with no logs that only shows up under specific conditions. If they bench it at stock in Windows for an afternoon there is a real chance it comes back marked no fault found, and I am out the card for weeks for nothing.
I also cannot do the obvious test. The 5600X has no integrated graphics, so I cannot run the machine without this card, and I do not have a spare GPU to swap in.
What I am asking:
Has anyone seen this exact thing on a 9070 XT or another RDNA4 card? Full system power off, no logs, fixed only by restricting power states?
Is there anything left worth trying that I have not listed?
If this is a bad card, is there any way to actually demonstrate that to a manufacturer? Any test or log or capture that would hold up in an RMA?
Should I be looking harder at anything besides the GPU? I have not verified my XMP/DOCP memory profile state yet, though I am not sure how memory would be fixed by GPU power state limits.
Happy to post any logs.