Monday, September 13th 2021
Even As Graphics Card Prices Skyrocket, Build Quality on the Decline?
So you finally fork out four-figures for a performance-segment graphics card that had a $350 predecessor a couple of generations ago, and what do you find? Misaligned thermal pads, poorly installed cooling, and other build quality flaws. Reddit and other social media platforms show a noticeable increase in people with fairly premium graphics cards that have manufacturing defects that can lower the product life. One such user, kamaloo92, posted pictures of an ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3080 Ti OC with a missing block of thermal pads over a row of memory chips. GDDR6X chips are capable of heating in the high-90s Celsius, and a poorly cooled block of memory can cause artifacting in the long run. This, from a company that prides itself in its manufacturing standards.
Another horror story comes from obamaprism3, who posted pictures of an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition with a poorly installed memory thermal pad that was so placed so far off, that it overlapped with the cooler's main base, posing severe risk of overheating and performance loss to the GPU. Staying with Founders Edition, a user named antonyjeweet discovered a worker's finger cot stuck under a memory thermal pad of their insanely expensive RTX 3090 Founders Edition card. Recently, we did the story of a PowerColor RX 6700 XT with protective film over thermal pads still in place.
Source:
VideoCardz
Another horror story comes from obamaprism3, who posted pictures of an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition with a poorly installed memory thermal pad that was so placed so far off, that it overlapped with the cooler's main base, posing severe risk of overheating and performance loss to the GPU. Staying with Founders Edition, a user named antonyjeweet discovered a worker's finger cot stuck under a memory thermal pad of their insanely expensive RTX 3090 Founders Edition card. Recently, we did the story of a PowerColor RX 6700 XT with protective film over thermal pads still in place.
31 Comments on Even As Graphics Card Prices Skyrocket, Build Quality on the Decline?
be a nightmare for users with a unicorn product having issues out of the box
@@haters stop pretending your pron stash isn't epic or your car a bit excessive, or your Colinectors edition SNES setup, peep's like weird shit to other peep's, just keep it legal Ffs.
I got weird covered, with old pc hardware memorabilia that's largely blown up\;)/ ,now.
The cards are being assembled incorrectly, the thermal pads being used are mediocre quality, and component lifespan drops dramatically as temperature increases. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a lot of failures right outside the warranty period of a couple years instead of the many years beyond the useful life of the product that's normal.