AMD's recent Radeon Software Adrenalin 19.7.3 beta drivers appear to break the fan settings of reference-design Radeon RX 5700 XT and RX 5700 cards. All earlier drivers for these cards offered good idle fan-speeds, despite the lack of fan-stop, with the fan of Radeon RX 5700 XT idling around 14% or 740 RPM. Once the new 19.7.3 drivers are installed, the fan-speed never drops below 23% or 1,170 RPM. This phenomenon can be observed even on the reference RX 5700, which now idles at 22% fan-speed, or 1,130 RPM, up from 13% or 685 RPM. This increases fan speed RPMs by 66% for the RX 5700 XT and +57% for the RX 5700. To demonstrate this bug, we first installed reference RX 5700 XT and RX 5700 cards with 19.7.2 drivers, and logged their idle fan-speeds using GPU-Z. Next we switched to 19.7.3 and recorded the same data for a completely idle card, sitting at the desktop.

The raised idle fan-speeds keep the GPU cooler when idling. With 19.7.2, the GPU hotspot was observed to be around 42deg C. Booting from 19.7.3, we see hotspot temperature settle down to around 38deg C for the RX 5700 XT, and to 37deg C for the RX 5700. Such a small difference at such low temperatures really shouldn't have any effect on longevity or anything else. On the other hand, higher fan-speeds also mean that the idle fan-noise levels are noticeably higher, and no longer match the idle fan-speeds measured in launch-day reviews by tech publications.