EVGA RTX 3090 fried from New World, the cause discovered: all the fault of a bad soldering

a case he has “inflamed“, literally, the summer of some fans who had dabbled in the Closed Beta of New World, developed by Amazon Games, and they had seen their GeForce RTX 3090 made by EVGA frying, ceasing to work. In fact, reports circulated that even the models of other manufacturers, even the Radeons, went up in smoke by reproducing the new MMORPG, but they have never been verified.

So far, no clarity had yet been made on the unfortunate event and, in a responsibility table tennis, the blame had bounced on the title (moreover then updated), driver settings and video card invoice. Finally, we have a decisive answer: the fault of the video card, plagued by a production problem. To talk about it was the same EVGA a PCWorld.

Analysis of the fried RTX 3090s after the game session with New World did emerge “a rare solder problem” limited to a small set of boards. The US company explained that it had received about two dozen dead GeForce RTX 3090s and immediately noticed that the cards were all made in 2020, probably shortly before or after the debut of the RTX 3090: they were therefore part of the initial production.

X-ray analysis has shown poor quality soldering work in the area around the MOSFET circuitry, crucial for the correct power supply of the video card, especially under load, even if the problem seemed to emerge browsing the game menu or loading the title. Indeed there could be a potential problem there, so much so that Amazon Games responded by adding a frame rate limiter in the menu with a patch. Without the limiter, the Closed Beta menu played at 800 fps.

“Like driving a car at full throttle uphill and accidentally putting the car in neutral. If you don’t lift your foot, the engine runs at top revs,” writes PCWorld looking for an analogy between the problem and real life.

In addition, EVGA has stated that the problem has affected only the GeForce RTX 3090 and no other modelsIn addition, the company immediately sent players replacement cards pending analysis of the product that is no longer functional. EVGA did not disclose the exact number of RTX 3090s that may have the problem of poor soldering, but spoke generically of a number “significantly less than 1% of the total,” reports PCWorld.

The discovery of welding problems sweeps away other theories, such as those related to a problem in the cooling system and more precisely to the fan controller. “Not in any way related to the fan controller“EVGA spokesman said. It was speculated that temperature monitoring did not keep pace with load changes, causing gaps in the response from the heatsink and leading to” deadly “temperature spikes for RTXs. 3090.

EVGA has also analyzed that possibility, discarding it. “Actually it may appear that the fan controller microcontroller is not working under the extreme fluctuations of New World, but the noise related issue on the i2c bus, which leads third party monitoring tools such as HWInfo and GPU-Z to incorrectly report the noise such as a malfunction of the fan controller. EVGA Precision X1 eliminates the noise and reports it correctly, “writes PCWorld. EVGA has however updated the microcontroller so that its operation can be seen correctly even by third-party tools. To get the latest microcontroller update you need to download the latest version of EVGA Precision X1.