[SOLVED] Powercolor RX 6600xt performance issues

[ohio_buckeye]

This may be more of an observation, I’ve got the current specs.

Ryzen 5 3600
AsRock AB350 pro 4
16 gb ddr4 3000 Corsair ram
Powercolor rx 6600 xt hellhound
PowerSpec 750 watt bronze power supply

Got the card a week or so ago, as I’ve used it, playing Homefront the Revolution mostly, noticed the game would freeze randomly but not crash. I’d read the game wasn’t developed the greatest so chalked it up to that. Decided to try call of duty war zone, and noticed similar behavior. The game even crashed on me.

Didn’t know really what was happening, as temps etc all looked in check. When I installed the card I used ddu, not in safe mode, to remove all nvidia drivers and installed amd drivers but I had that’s behavior.

Last night I rebooted into safe mode and did ddu for both nvidia and amd drivers. Rebooted and then installed amd gpu drivers.

I haven’t had time to test extensively but I noticed this card has a dual bios switch, one setting for oc, another for silent. It was on oc out of the box, so I switched it to silent mode, it seems to act a bit better. I’d also tried tweaking settings in the driver before.

Anyone else have this experience? Wondering if the oc they had applied wasn’t stable perhaps.

Forgot to mention cpu cooler I have a vetroo v5 with 2 fans installed in push pull, and 6 case fans. I think 3 front intake fans, 2 on top for exhaust, one rear exhaust.

 

[ohio_buckeye]

The other thing that went through my mind, I wonder if the vetroo v5 tower cooler is having any effect. It handles the 3600 quite well, but this is the motherboard I've got.

https://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/AB350 Pro4/index.asp#CPU

The thought that went through my mind as the VRMs on the board near the cpu. I previously had an AMD wraith prism cooler installed, but I'm wondering if I should reinstall the wraith prism. My cpu temps dropped about 3-4 degrees when I switched over to the vetroo, it's similar to a hyper 212. Just thinking the way the wraith prism is set up to down fire the air, if vrm's are a potential issue, it might create more airflow around them.

I should say as well, no overclocking going on except what the bios of the gpu is doing to the card from factory. As far as cpu, it runs stock.

 

[Flayed]

The other thing that went through my mind, I wonder if the vetroo v5 tower cooler is having any effect. It handles the 3600 quite well, but this is the motherboard I've got.

https://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/AB350 Pro4/index.asp#CPU

The thought that went through my mind as the VRMs on the board near the cpu. I previously had an AMD wraith prism cooler installed, but I'm wondering if I should reinstall the wraith prism. My cpu temps dropped about 3-4 degrees when I switched over to the vetroo, it's similar to a hyper 212. Just thinking the way the wraith prism is set up to down fire the air, if vrm's are a potential issue, it might create more airflow around them.

I dunno I mean the 3600 should be fine it's not a high-power chip.

 

[ohio_buckeye]

No problem, figured I'd just check. Trying to think over anything I'm missing.

 

[ohio_buckeye]

I ended up selecting the Corsair RM850x unit. So I'm $163 poorer after taxes. So that can get installed over the weekend, but that should last a couple of upgrade cycles anyway.

 

[RodroX]

I ended up selecting the Corsair RM850x unit. So I'm $163 poorer after taxes. So that can get installed over the weekend, but that should last a couple of upgrade cycles anyway.

On papers and reviews seems to be one hell of a solid unit. Congratulations!

 

[ohio_buckeye]

Yeah was talking to powercolor tech support, he said that’s a unit they normally test with. If that doesn’t work, then to change pci e setting to gen 3 in bios from auto. If I still have issues after that, reinstall os. If still having issues they will help with rma it sounds like.

 

[HappyTrails]

Having the thoughts maybe did you DDU old drivers, unplugs the internet so windows not have chance to mess things up and install latest adrenalins drivers? Think maybe its 21.6.1

 

[ohio_buckeye]

I had the amd installer do a factory reset. I think the latest as of the 25th was 21.8.2.

 

[spentshells]

Ok. I’ll keep an eye on it. Potentially have to have the car repaired this week. But since I used the switch on the card to move it over to silent mode, It seems to perform a bit better. So I may leave it there and if I replace the power supply, try moving it back.

Thinking there could have been leftover effects from drivers as well since I did not run ddu in safe mode the first time as well.

But I have been mulling the idea of installing a b550 board so I could swap to a 5000 series cpu later, might be a good time to do that.

actually yeah it would be a good time to get a mobo the selection is really good, prices (edit)are(/edit) good or not likely to get better.

 

[ohio_buckeye]

Yeah I’ll see what happens. I can get an asrock b550 phantom gaming for about 70 bucks, so might go for that at some point.

 

[elbubsio]

I have a pretty similar setup to you (Though I have a gold 650w Fractal PSU), and I'm also getting problems with my new 6600XT. It seems fine in games for me, but has problems rendering in blender. I'm hoping it's just buggy drivers as there's only a non WHQL set available atm that I can see (21.8.2). If I find out any more, I'll let you know and would appreciate it if you could do the same 🆒

 

[ohio_buckeye]

Haven’t been playing long but I just swapped for the Corsair rm850x, thus far it seems to be working a lot better. I can see my card actually boosting up to 2500mhz also.

One thing I did differently as well was plug into a surge protector with only 3-4 small things like lights on it and used the thicker gauge wire in the package with the new psu. It got past a point I had trouble on last night in Homefront so tentatively I think it’s doing better. Seems like I had a couple of small hitches but not to the extent I did. And almost all settings are turned to the highest levels.

 

[ohio_buckeye]

So finished the game tonight, a couple of lockups but not as bad as they were. The Homefront game could be at fault also. As I understand it they had a lot of development issues with that title. I will post back if I find more.

I will say I like amd as a company but I do feel like graphics wise nvidia is just ahead of them. I feel as though that I haven’t really had many issues with nvidia cards. Sometimes it seems like you have to tinker on the amd cards. But I definitely want to like this card so hopefully it keeps getting better. One other thing if you have an older board they’d suggested, I changed this also. In your bios, make sure to set your pci e slot from auto to pci e gen 3. That was one thing the powercolor tech said to do in the email.

 

[Third-Eye]

So finished the game tonight, a couple of lockups but not as bad as they were. The Homefront game could be at fault also. As I understand it they had a lot of development issues with that title. I will post back if I find more.

I will say I like amd as a company but I do feel like graphics wise nvidia is just ahead of them. I feel as though that I haven’t really had many issues with nvidia cards. Sometimes it seems like you have to tinker on the amd cards. But I definitely want to like this card so hopefully it keeps getting better. One other thing if you have an older board they’d suggested, I changed this also. In your bios, make sure to set your pci e slot from auto to pci e gen 3. That was one thing the powercolor tech said to do in the email.

Did you test the card with the other vBIOS switched from silent? Your issue might not be fixed from the new PSU if you were sill using the silent vBIOS. Also, it looks like your motherboard does not have a specific option to pick Gen 3 PCIE since Auto should already be 3.0. It might be different in a newer BIOS update.

If you decide to update your BIOS, make sure to follow the version update path after finding your current BIOS version. You can't just update to the newest version without installing required previous updates or you could brick the motherboard. All the older 300/400 series boards have this issue.

 

[ohio_buckeye]

Yes I was switched to the overclock vbios the entire time with the new psu.

In regards to the pci e gen 3 settings, I actually did find it buried I believe under advanced, in the section for AMD PBS iirc. At first I didn’t see it but found it when I looked again. My bios version was 6.30, since I’d previously updated. It looks like there is a 6.4, I think that opens up amd agesa 1.0.0.6 if I’m remembering correctly, not sure exactly what that gets me.

 

[ohio_buckeye]

So after the new psu and bios change, the card doesn’t seem to stutter but still rebooted my pc again. Very interesting. Contacted powercolor again so I’ll see what happens. In the mean time, I removed the drivers using ddu, but then extracted the driver and manually used device manager to install the gpu driver so that way no amd adrenaline software to contend with. So we’ll see what happens.

 

[Third-Eye]

So after the new psu and bios change, the card doesn’t seem to stutter but still rebooted my pc again. Very interesting. Contacted powercolor again so I’ll see what happens. In the mean time, I removed the drivers using ddu, but then extracted the driver and manually used device manager to install the gpu driver so that way no amd adrenaline software to contend with. So we’ll see what happens.

If the silent vBIOS still works, it's likely that the performance vBIOS needs to be flashed with a custom setting that is more stable. Other than running lower fan speeds at higher temps, you likely won't notice any performance difference between the two vBIOS settings and if you RMA the card, you will likely have to wait for a replacement card for a very long time or get a refund. I would just use the silent vBIOS and keep the card unless they will repair or replace it in a month or less.

 

[ohio_buckeye]

Yeah I’ll mess with it. As someone who likes amd, they really need to do better. Stuff like this makes me feel like buying from nvidia. In normal times I’d likely return this card to Microcenter for another card but right now I can’t find a comparable gpu for the money I paid.

But I did turn it back to silent and with the new psu I’ll try to test it out and see how it works. If the card still has trouble I guess I’ll rma, though I hate to be without a gpu. Just glad I didn’t buy this one used, though I’ve had great luck with used ones.

Also, one other question, my monitor is freesync capable, but I noticed in the driver, they want to automatically turn on what they call FreeSync Premium, my monitor is a couple of years old, so I'm not sure if my monitor properly supports FreeSync Premium. If I turn off FreeSync Premium, I wonder if that completely turns off the FreeSync capality. Just wondering if FreeSync Premium could be attributing.

 

[ohio_buckeye]

Update, hopes up a little. Will keep testing it. But after new Corsair power supply, as suggested above, switched bios switch back to the silent mode bios(note if you have one of these PowerColor RX 6600xt hellhound cards they probably come with the vbios switch on Overclock mode, at least mine did from the factory), but I also removed the 21.8.2 drivers as those are an optional, I think basically beta driver, and installed version 21.8.1, which I think is the first drivers for the RX 6600xt. Tonight I was actually able to play Battlefield 1 for about 1.5 hours with no freezing, no hangups, no reboots, black screens, etc.

I'll keep testing, but I'm hopeful. These new generations of cards seem picky about power delivery. Hopefully this is now fixed.

 

[ohio_buckeye]

So one more update, I can't say for sure that this is the final fix, but I've been able to play for a couple of evenings so far on BF1 at least with not many issues. I went into the AMD drivers and disabled all of the sharpening effects in global settings. In other words, select Esports mode in the driver, then turn off all the extra effects except Freesync.

This was after turning the card back to silent mode. So far the system seems happy. I am hopeful they soon bring out a recommended driver, but hopefully this card and I will be able to co-exist for a while, especially in today's market.

 

[ohio_buckeye]

Well another update. Beginning to be sorry I bought this card. Started trying to get into another title, but after an hour or two of heavy utilization the pc will reboot, but I don't think it's overheating as I'm keeping watch over it with the built in AMD display metrics that tells you fps temp etc. Getting very frustrated. I updated my drivers again to 21.8.2, the card reboots in the silent mode switch also, so I turned it back to the oc mode as well and even turned the power limit to 120% which according to a video helped someone else, but I'm getting annoyed with this card. Never these many issues with Nvidia cards. Either I've got a bad card or AMD drivers are that bad?

 

[Third-Eye]

Well another update. Beginning to be sorry I bought this card. Started trying to get into another title, but after an hour or two of heavy utilization the pc will reboot, but I don't think it's overheating as I'm keeping watch over it with the built in AMD display metrics that tells you fps temp etc. Getting very frustrated. I updated my drivers again to 21.8.2, the card reboots in the silent mode switch also, so I turned it back to the oc mode as well and even turned the power limit to 120% which according to a video helped someone else, but I'm getting annoyed with this card. Never these many issues with Nvidia cards. Either I've got a bad card or AMD drivers are that bad?

RMA the card, don't wait on it any longer. Many manufacturers are changing their warranty window for the newer GPUs to be much shorter.

If you have to underclock or switch vbios to get the card working and it still doesn't function properly, it means it's time to RMA for repair or replacement.

It's still possible though that your motherboard may be at fault, but I kind of doubt it if your previous card was working fine with the old power supply.

 

[ohio_buckeye]

Yeah the old cards I never had issues with. I already contacted powercolor again so waiting to hear back. If the new one does the same I’ll get a new board.

Edit, looks like Microcenter where I bought the card has more 6600xt cards in stock, so I think I may take a ride over first thing tomorrow when they open and return it for a new one and see what that does.

 

[ohio_buckeye]

Thanks to everyone for all the help. Returned the powercolor to Microcenter and came back with an asus dual 6600xt so hopefully this one decides to work.

Edit. Where I was having issues with kingdom come for example with my system restarting etc, with the new card played 2.5 hours so far, not one reboot or hang ups of any kind that I could detect. So I guess the powercolor was a defective card. Oh well. Just glad that this new card seems to be working as expected. Looks like I’ve got a good card to weather the shortages with now.

 

[scuffed_rayven]

just came here to say i have the same gpu and psu and have been having black screening/flickering issues. not sure if thats related to the psu.. also for some weird reason i cant access the bios or safe mode when drivers are installed. very strange. not sure whats up but ill try changing it to silent mode.