EVGA RTX 3090 cards that were bricked during Amazon’s New World gameplay had bad soldering
It took 6 weeks for EVGA to finally find the cause of the dead RTX 3090 cards.
No, it wasn’t a fan controller that caused RTX 3090 cards to suddenly die when playing New World. After a few weeks of investigation and thoroughly testing two dozens of RTX 3090 cards that were returned by customers, EVGA says they found the root cause behind the problem, PC World reports.
The game had an unusual high framerate in the main menu, which caused many cards to malfunction or even die (in extreme cases). In the threads covering the problem, EVGA RTX 3090 cards from EVGA were the most often mentioned, with multiple users left with dead cards and questions why has that happened in the first place.
As it turns out, it was a ‘rare soldering issue’ which was discovered by EVGA after X-Ray analysis of the affected cards. Only cards produced in 2020 were reportedly affected by this issue.
All 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. […]
The company declined to say how many GeForce RTX 3090 cards it has sold, but did characterize this small batch as significantly less than 1 percent of the total.
— Gordon Mah Ung, PC World
EVGA has since then released an updated firmware for its cards that solved the fan controller issue, which was originally believed to be the reason behind the problem. EVGA has stated that this wasn’t the case, and the misreporting in 3rd party applications such as HWiNFO or GPUZ was actually caused by a noise from the fan controller, but it had no effect on the card operations. EVGA’s own Precision software had already received a patch that filtered misreadings from the controller.
Amazon game studio has already issued a patch implementing a frame limited into the game, while EVGA has offered replacement cards to affected customers.
Source: PC World
