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
Amazon didn't make the ultimate "GPU killer"
Crysis still sitting on the throne.
the new lead-free solder doesn't handle so well the thermal expansion and contraction and have more internal flaws in the structure
Some just gimped 5C at one side and such problems emerge. It is a very large multilayer board, probably due to very high power design in mind, the VRM area is very copper dense and multiple vias poured thus needing more energy to properly diffuse solder. Well someone used a generic profile, that has worked fine previously on older cards and don't fix what ain't broken.
Other than that... it seems furmarking your newly acquired card ain't a bad idea... well at least while you have your warranty and not to have a revelation that you had a cold joint after the warranty ends.
What can be said is that 1) they should have a managerial call to fail that whole batch, observing high QC failures, 2) They should revise the QC testing criteria/environment.
Just an unfortunate early adopters thing I remember 20 series deaths were happening too with many manufactures pretty much why I hold off for a while.
EVGA stepped up as any owner would hope.
I've had/ have many evga cards and none have died all are/ were really good oc'ers to so they are my go to gpu manufacture "maybe not directly from them" regardless of this situation or past.
"Sorry our products are shit but we'll replace it for you without a fuss" isn't as good as just having a higher-quality working product in the first place.
Eventually the people will forget this all happened, so it'll just work itself out naturally.
in the end is like a lottery as we don't know what they use ....
IMO, the best warranty is the one you never have to use. If multitudes are praising the warranty service, that means multitudes are having failed parts that need warranty service. I shy away from EVGA for this reason.