Wednesday, September 1st 2021
EVGA Reveals that Bad Soldering Was the Culprit behind Bricked RTX 3090 Cards
When Amazon Studios released the closed beta for their upcoming New World MMO users begun to report that the game was causing catastrophic failure of their RTX 3090 graphics cards. This issue appears to have disproportionately affected EVGA cards with initial analysis indicating that the cause could have been with the fan controller malfunctioning evident by the bad readings received from third-party monitoring tools. This behavior was determined to not be the cause of card failures with monitoring working correctly when using the EVGA Precision X1 software. EVGA found that the fan controller issue was related to noise on the communication bus which their software could filter out and have released a micro-controller update that fixes monitoring with third-party tools.
The cause of the dead cards has now been determined by EVGA to be the result of a rare soldering issue limited to a small batch of cards. EVGA performed X-ray analysis on a selection of broken cards returned to them and found that the soldering around the MOSFET circuits had "poor workmanship". EVGA also confirmed that this issue was only present on early production runs in 2020 and affects less than 1 percent of all the RTX 3090 cards manufactured by the company. Amazon Game Studios have also added a frame limiter to New World that will ensure this issue won't appear in new versions of the game.
Source:
PC World
The cause of the dead cards has now been determined by EVGA to be the result of a rare soldering issue limited to a small batch of cards. EVGA performed X-ray analysis on a selection of broken cards returned to them and found that the soldering around the MOSFET circuits had "poor workmanship". EVGA also confirmed that this issue was only present on early production runs in 2020 and affects less than 1 percent of all the RTX 3090 cards manufactured by the company. Amazon Game Studios have also added a frame limiter to New World that will ensure this issue won't appear in new versions of the game.
EVGAAll of the cards were earlier production run cards manufactured in 2020. Under an X-ray analysis, they appear to have "poor workmanship" on soldering around the card's MOSFET circuits that powered the impacted cards.
59 Comments on EVGA Reveals that Bad Soldering Was the Culprit behind Bricked RTX 3090 Cards
I did use the Step-Up program once. It was for the 8800GTS 640MB cards I picked up, got them about 2 months before the G92 version (8800GTS 512MB) released. The process was simple.
I also never had issues with EVGA cards before. It was BFG and EVGA for me, until BFG closed doors. The EVGA 8800GTS cards all ran great, used the G92 cards for 3 years or so in SLI and sold them off locally to someone. Then I had a GTX 570, one from Zotac and EVGA. Ran them both in SLI for 4.5 years and both cards OC'ed really well. Then sold the EVGA 570 and gifted the Zotac one to my brother and he used it for a couple years. No issues with EVGA for me.
I just watch the shitshow unfold here on TPU and the main YouTube streamers like LTT/HWU/J2C
It's always EVGA.
You'll never see a 5 episode series on bad gpus from EVGA on Gamers Nexus.
And this is not just as simple as they make it out to be, people have been living with dying cards and endless RMA's since launch, way before the NW disaster, some guy was on the 6th RMA on EVGA's forum. And outside the EU you pay for the return fees, it isn't cheap.
EVGA RMA in this cards was already to high, NW changed nothing, only made it public.
For EVGA its also free advertising, but given the comments here I don't think that worked out like they had hoped. And rightly so. EVGA is starting to make a habit of having no generation without some issue plagueing their line up.Uncapped FPS in main menu is an extremely common thing. Borderlands has it, for example, and I can probably find a few dozen more. In most cases the menu screen is some pre-rendered or live rendered scene and if its very simple compared to the game, or if its just an image with some moving parts rendered over the same engine, its going to have fantastic performance numbers. Metro (1) is another example. The whole main menu and its different screens are just the ingame camera moving over assets. When I first played that game it ran at 30 FPS on a weak Kepler GPU. Now it runs at 100+ :D
Not all solder has lead these days anyways (though the ones with the best properties do).
I guess Steve not making a five part special and putting their bricked cards in every video helps
It would be nice if they found a material with the same properties and no toxicity.
I would say it isn't the minima culpa, let alone maxima culpa.
Just dust on everyone's eyes.
edit: just to clarify.. i don’t consider furmark a „game-like“ load, so i don’t use it to test and compare thermals/noise/„typical“ power
Furmark hasn't caused cards to draw more power than the expected TDP since driver and hardware changes were implemeneted after the GTX 200-series a decade ago. If a modern card can't survive Furmark it's defective and would likely fail under load anyway.
Furmark is just a convenient synthetic 100% load tester, it's not witchcraft, it just asks the driver to render a particularly intensive graphics scene that the card must, by design, be capable of doing.
If it was a soldering quality, then we would have heard that from many reviews and users who stress tested the cards using stress softwares like Furmarkwhat ?!,
go read any GPU reviews on TPU and see the Power consumption on furmark test, up to 20% power increase in furmark than peak gaming, also to your point the EVGA 3090 survived Furmark tests, so clearly the soldering can handle furmark over extreme condition which proves the root of the problems is a misconfigured bios
Different types of load stress different parts of the GPU; Inductor whine, for example, is a very audible sign of mechanical stress on soldered inductors and that behaviour is common in menus and other high-framerate, low-load scenarios where the GPU is mostly idle. It has crashed/damaged cards before and it will crash/damage cards in the future unless designs accommodate this rather common scenario.
The card design and soldering quality have to meet all possible load scenarios, not just gaming and furmark.