Amazon’s New World reportedly breaking RTX 3090 graphics cards

tomsguide.com

21 points·amlozano··9 comments

a game should never be able to fry hardware. the headline should be "rtx 3090 cards can be fried by playing a game".

It seems to be something mostly specific to the EVGA version of the card, which is a real head scratcher.

Badly implemented power limits, 5 mOhm resistors out of spec and bam all of a sudden you go past 350W (or whatever it is) hardware limit.

My first thought is this game just happens to put a lot of load on the card, and EVGA has some faulty VRMs out there that are burning up.

The RAM chips on the back of the card aren’t cooled well and can hit 110C regularly when mining. That can be fixed by using better thermal pads for the most part though. So my bet is that EVGA used a set of really bad thermal pads and the RAM on the back is dying.

There have been reports of this happening to non-EVGA cards on twitter, so the preponderance of EVGA cards failing here is likely just due to their market share. EVGA has sold far more RTX 3090 cards than any other AIB partner of nVidia.

Next month, Nvidia will be including this code in their drivers as anti-mining measure.

Seriously tho I'm interested what chain of events led to this possibility; it sounds like it might be something minor that some makers changed from a reference design...

Next month, Amazon will be selling a new "Amazon Basics" brand video card based on the RTX 3090.

> Most complaints seem to involve EVGA-made versions of the GeForce RTX 3090

Coincidentally, my evga gtx 1080 lit on green fire last week while powering the system on. It was during power up when I was there luckily, not over night. It’s terrifying when you think of what could have happened

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