EVGA Reveals that Bad Soldering Was the Culprit behind Bricked RTX 3090 Cards

[jardows]

EVGA seems to always get praise for great customer service but at the same time they need it because this is far from the first time they've been in the spotlight for defective graphics cards.

"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.

I have heard for many years how legendary EVGA's warranty and return policy is. I rarely hear people praise the quality of their products. That's a little troubling.

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.

 

[Tardian]

Lead is toxic.

Lead is a highly poisonous metal (whether inhaled or swallowed), affecting almost every organ and system in the human body. At airborne levels of 100 mg/m3, it is immediately dangerous to life and health. Most ingested lead is absorbed into the bloodstream. The primary cause of its toxicity is its predilection for interfering with the proper functioning of enzymes. It does so by binding to the sulfhydryl groups found on many enzymes, or mimicking and displacing other metals which act as cofactors in many enzymatic reactions. Among the essential metals that lead interacts with are calcium, iron, and zinc. High levels of calcium and iron tend to provide some protection from lead poisoning; low levels cause increased susceptibility.

Lead - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[neatfeatguy]

I have heard for many years how legendary EVGA's warranty and return policy is. I rarely hear people praise the quality of their products. That's a little troubling.

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.

I never had to use EVGA warranty, but I've had zero issues with EVGA cards over the years. Got a 3060 and 3060Ti from EVGA now, so we'll see how those do over the next few years.

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.

 

[Chrispy_]

I have heard for many years how legendary EVGA's warranty and return policy is. I rarely hear people praise the quality of their products. That's a little troubling.

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.

It's not even a problem for me, EVGA don't have any presence in my region.
I just watch the shitshow unfold here on TPU and the main YouTube streamers like LTT/HWU/J2C
It's always EVGA.

 

[Bomby569]

It's not even a problem for me, EVGA don't have any presence in my region.
I just watch the shitshow unfold here on TPU and the main YouTube streamers like LTT/HWU/J2C
It's always EVGA.

No one ever shits on EVGA like the other brands. NO ONE. you'll see. They have the media in their pocket, that's why they keep making bricks and exploding cards and everyone thinks they are the best brand.
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.

 

[xorbe]

I don't know whether to believe EVGA's statement or not, but Amazon shouldn't have changed anything not their problem. Amazon probably did it to appease EVGA to lower RMA rate ...

 

[Bomby569]

I don't know whether to believe EVGA's statement or not, but Amazon shouldn't have changed anything not their problem. Amazon probably did it to appease EVGA to lower RMA rate ...

Amazon didn't cause the problem, but having a uncaped fps at menus or worst the lobby was not ideal, people would be heating the room for nothing.

EVGA RMA in this cards was already to high, NW changed nothing, only made it public.

 

[Vayra86]

I don't know whether to believe EVGA's statement or not, but Amazon shouldn't have changed anything not their problem. Amazon probably did it to appease EVGA to lower RMA rate ...

More exposure for their MMO. This was free advertising for them, nothing else.

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.

Amazon didn't cause the problem, but having a uncaped fps at menus or worst the lobby was not ideal, people would be heating the room for nothing.

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+

 

[R-T-B]

Lead is toxic.

Lead - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

So don't lick your GPU.

Not all solder has lead these days anyways (though the ones with the best properties do).

 

[Turmania]

They had to own it as it was only their gpu's that suffered. But some suspicious events have happened like not naming their brand with some famous review sites, hard to prove they played a role or not but does not make sense to the review site that did it, oh well there is my two cents on it.

 

[Tardian]

So don't lick your GPU

R-T-B Can always be relied upon for good advice. GPU fan blades are really sharp. To reuse an old non-PC movie expression: Whiteman speaks with a forked tongue.

 

[Sybaris_Caesar]

This is what happens when outsourcing, its a shame video cards are not tested thoroughly as some power supplies are.

I mean, didn't most reviewers drop FurMark and OCCT since AMD and Nvidia introduced specific profiles for those stress tests and skewed the stress testing. Not to mention many dropped them since it's not indicative of real world usage anyway. Maybe someone backed up the offending New World version and use it to stress test GPUs in the future.

 

[mechtech]

Lead is toxic.

Lead - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Aluminum ain’t much better. It can cross the blood-brain barrier. As someone who worked in metal refining it’s a good rule of thumb to treat all metals with care and caution.

So don't lick your GPU.

Not all solder has lead these days anyways (though the ones with the best properties do).

Lead is amazing stuff in many ways. It’s too bad it’s so toxic and doesn’t break down. I have seen steel structures painted with red lead alkyd primer in the 60s and left out exposed to the weather and to this day I would say 95% is intact with no rust.

 

[george241312]

Hey they recognized the issue and are willing to fix it, unlike gigabyte and nzxt ...

 

[Bomby569]

Hey they recognized the issue and are willing to fix it, unlike gigabyte and nzxt ...

That's not true, NZXT also recognized the issue and were willing to fix it, the problem Steve from GN had with them is because they didn't recall them. Guess what neither did EVGA. Damn this double standard with EVGA.
I guess Steve not making a five part special and putting their bricked cards in every video helps

 

[Tartaros]

Lead is amazing stuff in many ways. It’s too bad it’s so toxic and doesn’t break down. I have seen steel structures painted with red lead alkyd primer in the 60s and left out exposed to the weather and to this day I would say 95% is intact with no rust.

It makes soldering electronics a breeze and good lead solders are indestructible, but it's so hard to make a safe environment to use it. Most of the problems I have soldering is always with lead free solder, I always replace it when I have to repair something next to a windows and a fan directly to my face when putting new solder.

It would be nice if they found a material with the same properties and no toxicity.

 

[R-T-B]

It makes soldering electronics a breeze and good lead solders are indestructible, but it's so hard to make a safe environment to use it. Most of the problems I have soldering is always with lead free solder, I always replace it when I have to repair something next to a windows and a fan directly to my face when putting new solder.

It would be nice if they found a material with the same properties and no toxicity.

My dad has a box of old lead solder. I try not to use it, but in tricky scenarios, I'd be lying if I said I never have.

 

[Tardian]

Me 2.

 

[RJARRRPCGP]

EVGA seems to always get praise for great customer service but at the same time they need it because this is far from the first time they've been in the spotlight for defective graphics cards.

eVGA calling out a mea maxima culpa.

 

[Turmania]

The thing that bothers me is they way evga gets special treatment as a company from famous review sites. They refused to name the company and made it sound like every other company had the problem but it was only one, and they knew it. Yet, they manipulated their position.

 

[Bomby569]

eVGA calling out a mea maxima culpa.

and yet in EVGA foruns, no one knows if their cards were affected, there is no serial number range for the bad cards, people have gone to endless costly RMA's, there is no recall of the bad cards.
I would say it isn't the minima culpa, let alone maxima culpa.
Just dust on everyone's eyes.

 

[W1zzard]

didn't most reviewers drop FurMark and OCCT since AMD and Nvidia introduced specific profiles for those stress tests and skewed the stress testing.

I always use furmark for some tests on every single card i review. If the card fails then its a design/production issue

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

 

[Chrispy_]

I always use furmark for some tests on every single card i review. If the card fails then its a design/production issue

This.

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.

 

[Tardian]

Furmark is just a convenient synthetic 100% load tester, it's not witchcraft

Hence TPU has W1zzard?

 

[Solid State Soul ( SSS )]

I dont believe them, EVGA RTX 3090 cards have been around long before New World came, and were stressed to the max by users playing a verity of games, its something about the New World game engine the triggers something in the card bios, creating problems.

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 Furmark

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.

what ?!,
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