Summary
Last week, AMD Radeon GPU users discovered that following one of the older Adrenalin driver updates, massive amounts of data were being continuously written to the system SSD. AMD acknowledged the bug and has now finally released a new driver update that addresses the issue. For context, several users shared their discoveries on X (formerly Twitter) showing a process called AMD External Events Client Module (atieclxx.exe) that was writing data to the system drive at up to 0.3 MB/s to 1.5 MB/s. In some cases, it reached 5 MB/s, which would theoretically amount to around 432 GB of data written every day. This wasn’t actual data written to the drive, so the impact on SSD health and lifespan is unclear. How to check and see if you’re affected Notably, not all users are affected by this bug. To check if your system is impacted, follow these steps:
- Press Ctrl + Shift + Esc to open Task Manager.
- Go to the Details tab.
- Right-click on any column header and click on ‘Select columns’.
- Enable I/O read bytes and I/O write bytes.
- Sort by I/O write bytes and look for ‘atieclxx.exe’. If the value keeps increasing, your system has been affected. Now, AMD has released Adrenalin Edition 26.11.1 as an optional driver update that brings two major fixes. One addresses excessive writes to the system drive at idle for Radeon RX 7000 series GPUs, and the other addresses the same issue when “moving or resizing application windows,” though the latter isn’t GPU-specific. Update to the latest AMD Adrenalin driver Download and install the Adrenalin Edition 26.11.1 driver
Head over to AMD’s support page. - Click on the Adrenalin Edition 26.11.1 Driver link to start your 1.7 GB download.
- Double-click on the downloaded package and select ‘Yes’ to start unpacking.
- AMD Software Installer should start and check the system for compatibility.
- Agree to the EULA.
- Click ‘Accept & Express Install’ to install the latest driver. This should resolve the bug that was introduced with a previous update. If not, contact AMD support for further instructions.