[The Exiled]

Vapor gate including failure of the entire quality management? Background on the cooler problem of the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX (MBA)

To be fair, I have to state that some of my conclusions are based on information from third parties (involved parties), but it seems completely plausible when looking at the usual business processes. I am, however, familiar with the processes at the manufacturers involved, because there are no real secrets there either. But what went wrong in detail must now be worked out and clarified by quality management as quickly and completely as possible. The globality and complexity of a quality management system includes all customer-supplier relationships and acts as a permanent, intensive interrelationship between them. And when we speak of quality here, the quality concept used stands as a unity of condition and quality requirement. The quality demanded is therefore not the maximum feasibility, but the correct realization of the quality requirements defined for a cooler. Errors can always happen and there is no such thing as 100% error-free production. But one must always strive to approach this unattainable ideal with a so-called zero-failure strategy.

What does it actually take to make a graphics card or do the finishing work? First of all, you commission board manufacturers to deliver the bare PCBs to the manufacturer, you buy all the components and sometimes even have the belts for the SMD components already assembled by third parties – and you buy a complete cooler. Before I go into this cooler and the other entanglements in the delivery process, let’s take a rough look at this with quality management first so we can also grasp the fundamental problem. While quality management is in the hands of AMD and, to a large extent, the contract manufacturer, third-party providers and suppliers must fit in seamlessly here. This is definitely a rocky road in the case of the RX 7900 XTX, as the cooler is supplied by Cooler Master. However, Cooler Master is also only “man-in-the-middle”, because the cooling construction including the vapor chamber is again made by Asia Vital Components Co, Ltd. (also known as AVC for short). So while QM is up to AMD and the contract manufacturer, Cooler Master has to subordinate and ensure QA on their part. The actual manufacturer AVC must in turn subordinate itself to the superordinate QA (and thus also to the general QM) and ensure QC on site during production.

Izvor: Igor'sLAB