Remember the unfortunate group of RTX 3090 owners who found themselves without a video card after trying to play New World? Well, there’s a good mechanical reason why.
Around 24 understandably angry owners of EVGA GeForce RTX 3090 cards — a card that costs at least $2879 in Australia — were forced to send their top-of-the-line hardware back after a New World beta session bricked the cards. The concern at the time was that New World might have had some impact, but both the developer and the manufacturer — and owners of other RTX 3090 cards made by other brands — confirmed that Amazon’s pirate MMO wasn’t the problem.
So EVGA investigated. In a statement to PC World, the components manufacturer confirmed that affected gamers were sent replacement cards immediately, rather than after the now-bricked cards had been returned. And after an analysis of the hardware, the fault was down to poor soldering around the GPU’s MOSFET components.
If that sounds like gibberish to you, here’s a quick primer. MOSFETs are basically small electrical switches that help regulate a device’s voltage, so they’re not just things you’d find on an expensive graphics card. MOSFETs can get supremely hot, up to 120 degrees in some cases,
Other concerns that EVGA fans weren’t operating as usual, although the company told PC World this was down to certain monitoring programs (like GPU-Z) not reporting the data properly. “In no way shape or form, is it related to the fan controller,” a spokesperson from EVGA said, adding that using EVGA Precision X1 would correctly report fan data from their GPUs.
So, all’s well that ends well then. The part of the story I like the most here is EVGA’s reaction when the cards failed. In the middle of the worst chip shortage we’ve seen in decades, sending out replacement cards immediately is a nice customer touch that I’m sure the 24 people affected would have appreciated. (To be fair, if I’d spent a few grand on a single GPU, that’s the kind of service I’d expect.)
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