AMD has had some trouble with its Ryzen chipset driver recently, and the company released a fix for these problems – but the bad news is that the fixed version reportedly causes issues of its own (at least for some folks).
The full story is that AMD released a new chipset driver in mid-March for Ryzen systems (A320 series up to X570 motherboards, and Threadripper X399 and TRX40). However, some users described problems on Reddit whereby the installation would get stuck at 0% on the progress bar.
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Although apparently, at least in some cases, the new driver would seemingly successfully install in the background anyway – but maybe not completely, according to reports (one common thread mentioned was that the PC eventually popped up with a message saying it needs to restart to finish the AMD GPIO install).
This bugbear only affected some folks, and there were workarounds floated on these Reddit threads, but obviously it was still a rather worrying issue to encounter. Even if the driver did seemingly install eventually, folks were obviously concerned that it might not have completely installed somehow.
Just over a week ago, AMD pushed out a new version of the chipset driver (v2.04.04.111), which in the release notes states that it cures the installer hanging during installation problem, and also an installer abort with ‘Error 1720’.
However, it seems that as Tom’s Hardware spotted, while it may have cured the issue in hand, ComputerBase forum members have reported that the update is causing new problems.
Power problems?
Reports suggest that the GPIO driver (General-Purpose I/O controller) isn’t always updated to the latest version, and that some Ryzen owners are experiencing incorrect operating voltages, and increased processor power consumption – which is definitely a worry. Some issues are also being caused with Ryzen Master, apparently.
AMD is investigating the issue after ComputerBase flagged it up to the company, and it has asked for affected users to send log files which will be anonymously analyzed to help with the efforts of trying to pin down a fix (another one – hopefully with no unfortunate side-effects this time).
Meanwhile, particularly if your Ryzen PC is running fine right now, you may want to hold off updating the chipset driver until we see the results of AMD’s investigation, and whether any remaining gremlins can be ironed out.
Fixes causing more problems themselves is nothing new for tech companies, of course, and it seems to be becoming a habit with Microsoft and Windows 10, although Apple has also recently got in on the act with macOS.
