Yeah, that sounds like eVGA. I'm surprised they didn't ban your forum user account when you brought up the issue.
I was also surprised they did not try to bully me.
When I complained about their USB issues on the P55 boards, and how their BIOS caused the problem(USB worked perfectly with an earlier BIOS and didn't with a later BIOS), there were several people in the thread that agreed with me and had the same issues. I was PM'd by a mod and told to never post in the thread again and never talk about the USB issues anywhere on the forums again, or I would be banned...
Yes, that sounds like their moderators. I believe that if you are willing to kiss the moderators behinds, you can do or say pretty much anything, but if you disagree with them, they look for any excuse to reprimand you.
I don't think a few isolated issues is enough to warrant them admitting there is a problem,
True, I have only seen a dozen or so people posting about the issue.
obviously my cards work just fine and have since I bought them last September, and there are probably way more cards that function fine than one like yours that have some kind of issue.
Yes, but if there are, as you say, an insignificant number of 'bad' cards, I would believe eVGA would want to make it right (i.e. replace with new, not recertified, cards, or even upgrade to a newer card) for that very small number of customers.
The design of the cooler at least is sound,
If you say so, I really do not know one way or the other.
it is just a scaled down GTX470 cooler, with 3 heatpipes instead of 4, but it is a HDT style cooler. The biggest issue I have with it is that it doesn't really cool the VRM. If anything that is the major failure point I see.(So much so that eVGA released a VRM heatsink for the cards.)
I read somewhere the VRM heatsinks did little-to-nothing to help the cards. Of course, I would take that with a grain of salt, but, eVGA did stop selling the heatsinks after a short period...
However, it is possible that the heatpipes in your cooler failed for some reason and that caused the issue you are having. The heatpipes did seem a little bit "iffy" on quality when I took the cooler apart, so I can see that happening.
How would I determine if the heatpipes have failed?
I would like to mention that when I was trying whatever people were suggesting, in order to resolve the overheating issue, I took the heatsink off the card and cleaned the fins under running water. I noticed that using hot water to clean the fins did not make the base of the heatsink get hot, but only warm.
I had previously used the running hot water method before on my TRUE-120, and the heatsink base got very hot, very quickly.