EVGA GTX 1070/1080 Overheating Issues Update - New BIOS Revision To Be Released

[Raevenlord]

After reports of EVGA cards overheating and sometimes becoming non-operational, which we covered right here on TPU, the company has now issued a statement further clarifying the steps it's taking towards solving the issues. Though it was first reported that only the GTX 1070/1080 FTW series of cards were having issues, the company has also extended its efforts towards the GTX 1060 cards, in both 3 GB and 6 GB flavors, which may point to either underlying problems with those cards as well, or simply EVGA extending that bit of extra support to their customers.

While at first it seemed that the company-distributed, free-of-charge thermal pads (which EVGA stressed were optional in nature) would be enough to fix any and all issues, the company is also issuing a BIOS revision in a few days, which "adjusts the fan speed curve" to "ensure sufficient cooling of all components across all operating temperatures".





While this is sure to mar the company's sterling reputation, and users will probably have to deal with higher operating noise due to the cards' revised fan profiles with the upcoming BIOS update, the company must still be commended for tackling the issues with brevity and decisiveness.

Read the company's statement regarding these issues below:

"Recently, it was reported from several sources, that the EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 FTW PWM and memory temperature is running warmer than expected during Furmark (an extreme stress utility). EVGA has investigated these reports and after extensive testing, below are our findings:

• On ACX 3.0, EVGA focused on GPU temperature and the lowest acoustic levels possible. Running Furmark, the GPU is around 70C +/- and the fan speed is running approximately 30% duty cycle or lower.
• However, during recent testing, the thermal temperature of the PWM and memory, in extreme circumstances, was marginally within spec and needed to be addressed.

Conclusion: EVGA offers full warranty support on its products, with cross-ship RMA (available in the Continental United States, Hawaii, Alaska, Canada, EU, UK, Norway, and Switzerland. EVGA offers Standard RMA replacement options in the Middle East, Africa, India or outside of the before mentioned supported areas), and stands behind its products and commitment to our customers.

To resolve this, EVGA will be offering a VBIOS update, which adjusts the fan-speed curve to ensure sufficient cooling of all components across all operating temperatures. This VBIOS will be released in the next few days and users can download it and update their cards directly. This update resolves the potential thermal issues that have been reported, and ensures the card maintains safe operating temperatures.

For those users who want additional cooling beyond the VBIOS update, EVGA has optional thermal pads available. This update is not required, however; EVGA will make it available free of charge to any customer who is interested. To request the thermal pad kit, please visit www.evga.com/thermalmod.

Any customer who is not comfortable performing the recommended VBIOS update, may request a warranty cross-shipment to exchange the product to EVGA for an updated replacement.

All graphics cards shipped from EVGA after 11/1/2016 will have the VBIOS update applied."

The company also presented a FAQ regarding these issues, as well as the graphics card models involved, so make sure to check the images below for more clarification.



View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[Chaitanya]

the company must still be commended for tackling the issues with brevity and decisiveness

Are joking? Cheapskate engineers decide to skimp on thermal pads for vrms that cost few pennies and then overpriced cards start failing. if anything these evga deserves bad press and suffer loss of sales.

 

[ironwolf]

Are joking? Cheapskate engineers decide to skimp on thermal pads for vrms that cost few pennies and then overpriced cards start failing. if anything these evga deserves bad press and suffer loss of sales.

Yup yup, sounds like this would have been a non-issue if they didn't cheap out by not putting the thermal pads on the card. This is rightfully deserved bad PR that they need to just take up the shoot and [hopefully] learn for next time.

 

[owen10578]

Are joking? Cheapskate engineers decide to skimp on thermal pads for vrms that cost few pennies and then overpriced cards start failing. if anything these evga deserves bad press and suffer loss of sales.

The problem isn't that it doesn't have thermal pads. Its that the VRMs are only connected to the metal baseplate by thermal pads and it's proving to not be enough under furmark using the conservative fan curve. So the problem could be solved by using more thermal pads to contact the baseplate to the heatsink or raise the fanspeed in the bios or something. Its really just a problem that didn't exist outside of furmark.

 

[Jism]

Are joking? Cheapskate engineers decide to skimp on thermal pads for vrms that cost few pennies and then overpriced cards start failing. if anything these evga deserves bad press and suffer loss of sales.

That's nonsense. The card will work fine in 99.9% of games and apps people use them for. If you run Furmark, your causing a load that's unreal and will never be archieved by whatsoever benchmark or game.

Furmark is taxing VRM's up to 20 to 40% more then a game would ever do. They engineered that card for games and such.

If i was'nt mistaken, the card was tested with furmark going for 1.5 hours long? Thats crazy.

 

[Nkd]

I had the 1070 evga before I sold it off to try out freesync. I can pretty much promise you that the fans are under utilized on these cards. The card simply is quiet and can not be heard. I had pretty good air flow so I didn't have an issue but I think adjusting the fan speed even a little should fix it. The card was quiet up to like 60%. They use so top notch fans.

 

[Batou1986]

Can we stop parroting this nonsense about furmark being the problem here.

No computer component should ever fail simply from being 100% utilized.
Its like saying your car can go up to 100mph but at that speed the brakes fail, but its ok because the speed limit on roads is 75mph so going 100mph is unreasonable.

 

[OneMoar]

so tl:dr idiots using fur-mark after repeatedly being told not to , blowing there cards up and blaming evga

Bet you would defend Evga if they told their customers to not use the cards at all after purchasing purely to prevent potential damage....

if said customers are complete idiots, you bet your bacon I would

The problem is that the fan curve isn't tuned to handle such high heatload on the VRM since its meant to be really quiet while gaming hence the updated BIOS with increased fanspeeds and also you can probably "fix" it by increasing the fans yourself. Not that there was any problem in the first place.

*while overclocking and forcing the fan speed to <60%

Can we stop parroting this nonsense about furmark being the problem here.

No computer component should ever fail simply from being 100% utilized.
Its like saying your car can go up to 100mph but at that speed the brakes fail, but its ok because the speed limit on roads is 75mph so going 100mph is unreasonable.

O but that is how it works in irl if you drive your car at 100Mph everyday to work and blow the engine up after 50k then guess what the manufacturer is gonna tell you to stuff it,infact there are clauses in the warrantee for that just like when all those idiots that bought brand new GTR's blew the transmissions up using launch control and where basicly told to stove it up there ass when they shattered the transmission all over the drag strip

its (been)widely accepted for years that furmark is good for one thing and thats blowing vrm's up
if you are using furmark for anything and you aren't under ln2 then your a fking idiot and should never own a expensive gpu ever again

but hey don't take my word for it, go ahead and hold your car at redline for 20m and report back o and might wanna put some catlitter down first , getting oil and bits of twisted metal out of the driveway can be a real pain and I am totally sure your powertrain warrantee will cover you riiiiiight

 

[Chaitanya]

That's nonsense. The card will work fine in 99.9% of games and apps people use them for. If you run Furmark, your causing a load that's unreal and will never be archieved by whatsoever benchmark or game.

Furmark is taxing VRM's up to 20 to 40% more then a game would ever do. They engineered that card for games and such.

If i was'nt mistaken, the card was tested with furmark going for 1.5 hours long? Thats crazy.

Forget furmark, I live in Western part of India. during summers(march to may) here temps go upto 47°C. I have problems with one of R9-290 shutting down due to heat build up, I expect these evga cards to be in same league. Also evgas solution to this fiasco was providing thermal pads which user could install on their own was another joke. Many people purchase evga cards as they are "higher quality" compared to asus or gigabyte cards and more half of those users arent comfortable removing gpu cooler to perform the said thermal pads.

 

[TheGuruStud]

O but that is how it works in irl if you drive your car at 100Mph everyday to work and blow the engine up after 50k then guess what the manufacturer is gonna tell you to stuff it,infact there are clauses in the warrantee for that just like when all those idiots that bought brand new GTR's blew the transmissions up using launch control and where basicly told to stove it up there ass when they shattered the transmission all over the drag strip

its (been)widely accepted for years that furmark is good for one thing and thats blowing vrm's up
if you are using furmark for anything and you aren't under ln2 then your a fking idiot and should never own a expensive gpu ever again

Those aren't even comparable things. Exercising an engine isn't going to blow it up unless it's defective (and the manuf. is absolutely liable as long as it was not overheated and was properly lubricated). Blowing a transmission, b/c you failed to allow it to cool down is abuse and not covered (hence the documentation).

People are not abusing cards just by running furmark. As far as the (lame) user is aware, the product is performing under normal conditions (GPU is not overheating). As long as it's not OV/OCed, then the user cannot be construed as abusing the card, especially since the chip itself power throttles.

If OV/OCing (I wonder if just increasing power limit counts), then (technically more than anything) the warranty is void. Even so, under normal OCing, these cards are WELL within their design parameters. The cards are marketed and supposedly produced for OCing.

If some engineer morons or bean counters did not adequately cool the VRMs resulting in premature failure under normal conditions (being no OC or unmodded OCing), then the manuf. is at fault. Cars would be recalled if they just burned up, b/c people "drove them too hard." If the manuf. had cared at all about the product and adequately equipped it for use, then it would have had proper VRM cooling, or at least some goddamn more temp sensors to throttle the card if the VRMs overheated.

EVGA has no excuse as higher end cards have had VRM cooling for...how many years, now? There is no precedent to exclude what is basically an industry standard and necessity for proper function to blame users for running a common piece of software.

Who wants to bet that I can recreate this issue without furmark on certain games with no framerate cap? Or 200 fps menus? Any takers? Poor case ventilation, but adequate enough for the GPU would make this a real nightmare for naysayers.

If you can expediently ruin a piece of hardware with workload software, then the hardware is at fault. Sorry. These cards aren't being ran in the middle of summer in Australia with no A/C (I would call that abuse lol).

Forget furmark, I live in Western part of India. during summers(march to may) here temps go upto 47°C. I have problems with one of R9-290 shutting down due to heat build up, I expect these evga cards to be in same league. Also evgas solution to this fiasco was providing thermal pads which user could install on their own was another joke. Many people purchase evga cards as they are "higher quality" compared to asus or gigabyte cards and more half of those users arent comfortable removing gpu cooler to perform the said thermal pads.

Thank you. One would expect the same scenario for these cards, especially when the user has no oversight of the VRMs.

A full recall/replacement should have been enacted. They just screwed themselves.

 

[OneMoar]

Those aren't even comparable things. Exercising an engine isn't going to blow it up unless it's defective (and the manuf. is absolutely liable as long as it was not overheated and was properly lubricated). Blowing a transmission, b/c you failed to allow it to cool down is abuse and not covered (hence the documentation).

People are not abusing cards just by running furmark. As far as the (lame) user is aware, the product is performing under normal conditions (GPU is not overheating). As long as it's not OV/OCed, then the user cannot be construed as abusing the card, especially since the chip itself power throttles.

If OV/OCing (I wonder if just increasing power limit counts), then (technically more than anything) the warranty is void. Even so, under normal OCing, these cards are WELL within their design parameters. The cards are marketed and supposedly produced for OCing.

If some engineer morons or bean counters did not adequately cool the VRMs resulting in premature failure under normal conditions (being no OC or unmodded OCing), then the manuf. is at fault. Cars would be recalled if they just burned up, b/c people "drove them too hard." If the manuf. had cared at all about the product and adequately equipped it for use, then it would have had proper VRM cooling, or at least some goddamn more temp sensors to throttle the card if the VRMs overheated.

EVGA has no excuse as higher end cards have had VRM cooling for...how many years, now? There is no precedent to exclude what is basically an industry standard and necessity for proper function to blame users for running a common piece of software.

Who wants to bet that I can recreate this issue without furmark on certain games with no framerate cap? Or 200 fps menus? Any takers? Poor case ventilation, but adequate enough for the GPU would make this a real nightmare for naysayers.

If you can expediently ruin a piece of hardware with workload software, then the hardware is at fault. Sorry. These cards aren't being ran in the middle of summer in Australia with no A/C (I would call that abuse lol).



Thank you. One would expect the same scenario for these cards, especially when the user has no oversight of the VRMs.

A full recall/replacement should have been enacted. They just screwed themselves.

there is plenty of precent the manufacturers have advised for YEARS not to use furmark . if you ask any support agent from evga or msi or sapphire they will flat tell you NO furmark is not something you should be using EVER

and running a game at 200fps staring at a menu isn't even close to the amount of stress furmark puts on a vrm you need to understand that due to the way furmark works its in no way at all anything close to what could be seen running a game

furmark is not a workload its a power-virus ,it makes the ALU's run the same instruction with minimal stall or cache-miss it absolutely hammers the core way beyond what it was ever intended to be utilized to Well beyond what is possible running a normal dx12 or vulkan render scenarioo

and yes red-line means MAXIMUM RPM, and yes you can blow a engine up if you bounce it off the rev-limiter long enough,especially if you aren't moving it will just sit there and build heat untill it either boils over and you stop or you keep pushing it untill it pops, and sometimes they will just pop anyway


and the people blowing the trannys out of gtr's where not overheating them they would do so many launch-control enabled launches(not in a row) and then it would puke its guts out

the bottom line is that no amount of engineered safety protocols will protect a device against the determined idiot or just plain ignorance

heres what people where doing, they where playing the power limit sliders overclocking and playing with the fan speed curves and then running furmark or have the fan speed curve set way to low and running the core to 90c and blowing stuff up
as far as google tells me out of the box there has been zero issues with any of the cards

NV's new power management scheme is very smart its basically impossible to blow the card up unless you tinker with the sliders the driver won't let you the bios won't let you

 

[owen10578]

Can we stop parroting this nonsense about furmark being the problem here.

No computer component should ever fail simply from being 100% utilized.
Its like saying your car can go up to 100mph but at that speed the brakes fail, but its ok because the speed limit on roads is 75mph so going 100mph is unreasonable.

The problem is that the fan curve isn't tuned to handle such high heatload on the VRM since its meant to be really quiet while gaming hence the updated BIOS with increased fanspeeds and also you can probably "fix" it by increasing the fans yourself. Not that there was any problem in the first place.

 

[ZoneDymo]

so tl:dr idiots using fur-mark after repeatedly being told not to , blowing there cards up and blaming evga

Bet you would defend Evga if they told their customers to not use the cards at all after purchasing purely to prevent potential damage....

 

[Legacy-ZA]

Well, I requested the thermalpad mod since the day I read about this issue, yet my ticket is still on; "Your request is awaiting approval."

Though I do not use FurMark, I do want to overclock this card eventually, also, it's summer here at the moment and I don't own a air conditioner.

Just the other day, ambient temperatures were 39 Degrees Celsius, even with my custom fan curve that is very aggressive, this card reached just under 80 degrees and that is the GPU alone, hell, I don't even want to know what the memory and VRM's were at. :/

 

[OneMoar]

Well, I requested the thermalpad mod since the day I read about this issue, yet my ticket is still on; "Your request is awaiting approval."

Though I do not use FurMark, I do want to overclock this card eventually, also, it's summer here at the moment and I don't own a air conditioner.

Just the other day, ambient temperatures were 39 Degrees Celsius, even with my custom fan curve that is very aggressive, this card reached just under 80 degrees and that is the GPU alone, hell, I don't even want to know what the memory and VRM's were at. :/

so long as the fan was running at >60% you are fine

 

[Legacy-ZA]

so long as the fan was running at >60% you are fine

My custom fan curve is as follows:

60 degrees - Fan @ 0%
61 degrees - Fan @ 25%
63 degrees - Fan @ 35%
65 degrees - Fan @ 45%
67 degrees - Fan @ 55%
69 degrees - Fan @ 65%
71 degrees - Fan @ 75%
80 degrees - Fan @ 85%
85 degrees - Fan @ 100%

So yes, my card should be fine, but in the end, this shouldn't have been necessary to start with. I suppose in the end when I do get my thermal pads and remove the cooling solution I will see if any damage was done. Also I don't care for EVGA's or anyone's excuses really... If you advertise your cooler for O/C, low temperatures and low noise; then it should deliver just that, this card costs more, so you can have all those things... but in the end however, it was sugar coated and it was last thing you got...

*Edit* Oh yeah, let's not forget that the fans won't last as long now either, since they are operating at higher RPM. All I am seeing is negatives, this is my first EVGA card, but also my last.

 

[Raevenlord]

Are joking? Cheapskate engineers decide to skimp on thermal pads for vrms that cost few pennies and then overpriced cards start failing. if anything these evga deserves bad press and suffer loss of sales.

I believe mistakes can happen, and that the only people who don't make mistakes, ever, are those who don't do anything. While I do agree that it appears this problem could've been completely avoided with some extra cents spent on each card, and thus it falls on EVGA's lap, I also think that the company is taking the correct position (and the only correct one, obviously) in tackling it - honoring their RMA and warranty, and offering to do the BIOS updates and thermal pad installation themselves.

In regards to sales and consumer confidence... everything has consequences. I'm sure some current customers, and some would-be customers, will think twice before buying an EVGA card in the future - what with the hassle, the increased dBa on cards that were marketed as silent and premium... While that is justified or not depends on your own way of thinking

 

[bug]

The "funny" thing about all this is you only have this problem if you've paid extra for the premium, FTW design. I went for the SC version, which is just reference design, custom cooler and one of the heftiest out-of-the-box overclocks you can get and I'm all good.
While I don't know about the premium on 1070 or 1080, the 1060 MSRP is $249, I paid $259 for SC and FTW starts around $300. That's a lot of money for what you get in return, imho.

 

[stiglet]

Its like saying your car can go up to 100mph but at that speed the brakes fail

Actually this is not far from the truth. Car brakes are designed to stop a car from it's designed top speed without failing ONCE within a reasonable time scope. Let the brakes cool off and you can do it again. However, if you took a car out onto the track and did this repeatedly you would find that standard road brakes will overheat and start fading out, and eventually just stop working all together. I know because I've experienced it first hand.

I understand what you're trying to say, but unfortunately when it comes to designing individual components, things are not as black and white like you say. This is beyond 100% utilisation, just the same as driving a family saloon or an SUV at 150mph then braking to standstill once is fine but slag it round the Nurburgring for 5 hours and those brakes are fucked.

 

[ssdpro]

That is why I don't use or trust these janky aftermarket homebrew coolers. EVGA isn't the first to have these problems with janky coolers. People think these companies have teams and labs testing this stuff but the reality is a couple guys in a room holding the company together with duct tape and zip ties. My Founder's Edition doesn't need surgery or bios updates to stop the bleeding. It also default clocks higher than the posted clocks of even the FTW. It vents out the back of my case instead of inside like a clown cooler.

 

[trog100]

if furmark breaks them the hardware is at fault.. end of story.

trog

 

[stiglet]

That is why I don't use or trust these janky aftermarket homebrew coolers. EVGA isn't the first to have these problems with janky coolers. People think these companies have teams and labs testing this stuff but the reality is a couple guys in a room holding the company together with duct tape and zip ties. My Founder's Edition doesn't need surgery or bios updates to stop the bleeding. It also default clocks higher than the posted clocks of even the FTW. It vents out the back of my case instead of inside like a clown cooler.

Yeah, people often criticise the reference coolers but unless you do more than a mild overclock, they always just work and in every and any situation. Wanna squeeze two 1080s into a tiny case with shit airflow? Reference will handle that. Wanna run four of them tightly packed? Reference will handle that.

They're loud and can't handle extreme overclocks, but if you use the GPU as it came from Nvidia they will never go wrong in any situation or case setup.

 

[Solidstate89]

So, from the sounds of it, it's a good thing that I set the fan profile to aggressive in the EVGA Precision application.

This really soured me on EVGA who I've had good experience with in the past. I thought one of the benefits of getting a card with a backplate (like my FTW 1070s that I have) is not just for aesthetics, but to also help with thermal performance. But what's the point of that if there's no fucking thermal pads to interface with the backplate?

Next time I upgrade my machine, I'm going to have see what other options are out there that I would want.

 

[Solidstate89]

That is why I don't use or trust these janky aftermarket homebrew coolers. EVGA isn't the first to have these problems with janky coolers. People think these companies have teams and labs testing this stuff but the reality is a couple guys in a room holding the company together with duct tape and zip ties. My Founder's Edition doesn't need surgery or bios updates to stop the bleeding. It also default clocks higher than the posted clocks of even the FTW. It vents out the back of my case instead of inside like a clown cooler.

Yeah, the Founder's Editions never had their own problems regarding throttling issues or having unnecessary fan spin-ups. Nope, not at all. They were absolutely perfect in every single way...

http://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080-fan-issues-fix/

 

[ssdpro]

Yeah, the Founder's Editions never had their own problems regarding throttling issues or having unnecessary fan spin-ups. Nope, not at all. They were absolutely perfect in every single way...

http://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080-fan-issues-fix/

wccftech? Really? On a more reputable note, try here: https://www.techpowerup.com/222895/...edition-owners-complain-of-fan-revving-issues

There is a big difference between fans revving up and cards overheating and burning due to poor quality aftermarket coolers that vent into your case. These cheap aftermarket coolers are like a clown turning his mask around backwards and blowing really hard.