Warning on Evga 1080 cards

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mls1995

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I've been an admitted evga fanboy for many years, but there are a TON of complaints over on the evga forums (and some here) for their 1080 line. From the evga 8800 gtx card and up, I've had nothing but Evga cards. I'm not deluded into thinking their cards are necessarily better but their support has always made buying evga a smart idea.

Now some of these problems are certainly user error but there are just so many people with problems that it warrants a post.

A sampling (I'm too busy to grab from other sites):

Tomb Raider doesn't work and cooler sucks
EVGA Pricing on GTX 1080

Tomb Raider doesn't work
GTX 1080 issue with Rise of Tomb Raider - EVGA Forums

Cooler sucks
1080/1070 FAN NOISE? - EVGA Forums

More cooler sucks
GTX 1080 ACX 3.0 Buzzing noise & fan revving - EVGA Forums

Freezing
1080 SC Freezes in Doom - EVGA Forums

Coil whine
Any coil whine during high fps games? - EVGA Forums

Crashing
Games are starting to crash with 1080 - EVGA Forums

Poor performance
Help with GTX 1080 poor performance - EVGA Forums

More poor performance
GTX 1080 SC Issues, please help if you can. - EVGA Forums

Even more poor performance
Something is very wrong with my 1080 setup, need help - EVGA Forums

Boot error
EVGA GTX 1080 FE boot error that follows card - EVGA Forums

SLI problems
GTX 1080 SLI Stuttering issues in GTA 5 - EVGA Forums

Screen Tearing
Lines while mouse wheel scrolling in windows similar to tearing effect? - EVGA Forums

Texture Clipping
Gtx 1080 Clipping Texture and some little bug in Game Just cause 3 , The witcher 3 . - EVGA Forums

Artifacting
GTX 1080 artifacting issue - EVGA Forums

Display goes black
1080's causing my display to go black - EVGA Forums

Manufacturing problem of plastic under screws (30+ minutes of work to fix but annoying)
Really Evga? Acx 3.0 Fail - EVGA Forums

There's also a TON of people angry as heck that they preordered from evga and were promised first dibs on the FTW card (paying shipping and tax) and then newegg sold a batch before any of these people got their cards.

As I've posted before today, I rejected delivery of a 1080 SC card today as the 1080 SC card seems to have more complaints than any other card. And newegg's return policy sticks me with an SC forever if I had accepted delivery and opened it. I definitely have little confidence in the ACX cooler.

At this point, I'd jump from evga to MSI if their prices weren't so ridiculous. Guess I'm in a holding pattern and I'll check back in July I guess. I think the Asus strix looks nice but their support has such a bad rap. Meh, I'm waiting a few weeks to see what happens.
 
Isn't the SC card just a reference design with an aftermarket cooler? Game issues should be driver/firmware issues that could be a problem for any manufacture. Coil whine is also an issue for the other references cards (Founders edition).

If you don't want coil whine your best odds are probably with a non-reference design with upgraded power components.
 
JohnleMVP said:
Isn't the SC card just a reference design with an aftermarket cooler? Game issues should be driver/firmware issues that could be a problem for any manufacture. Coil whine is also an issue for the other references cards (Founders edition).

If you don't want coil whine your best odds are probably with a non-reference design with upgraded power components.
Click to expand...

Really? I have not heard of any issues with FE cards.
 
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JohnleMVP said:
Isn't the SC card just a reference design with an aftermarket cooler? Game issues should be driver/firmware issues that could be a problem for any manufacture. Coil whine is also an issue for the other references cards (Founders edition).

If you don't want coil whine your best odds are probably with a non-reference design with upgraded power components.
Click to expand...

Yes, it's reference PCB but a lot of complaints about the cooler.
 
mls1995 said:
To be fair, you never told me you are a fortune teller! It was so early in the process that there weren't very many complaints at the time.
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Haha, well it was my personal past experience with acx and a "lucky" guess. Anyway, I was surprised myself to see so many complaints in a short time on a not widespread product.
 
Raendor said:
Haha, well it was my personal past experience with acx and a "lucky" guess. Anyway, I was surprised myself to see so many complaints in a short time on a not widespread product.
Click to expand...

Yeah the shit has really hit the ACX fan over there.
 
Half of those links are driver issues and some were fixed with the help of forum members. Others possible defective issues that are normal for any AIB. People are going to turn to the forums to bitch. Only one that stands out is the plastic under the screws. A mistake that should have been caught but nothing disastrous.

Coil whine and board components, I like to know if there is or how big of a difference between reference cards.
 
Blazemore said:
Half of those links are driver issues and some were fixed with the help of forum members. Others possible defective issues that are normal for any AIB. People are going to turn to the forums to bitch. Only one that stands out is the plastic under the screws. A mistake that should have been caught but nothing disastrous.

Coil whine and board components, I like to know if there is or how big of a difference between reference cards.
Click to expand...

Every EVGA card in the wild is a reference card with a custom cooler, or a FE. Either way they're Nvidia PCBs at this point. You're correct in that the plastic under the screws is the only unique issue here. Bad fans happen with any manufacturer, and most of the issues going on over there are simply user/system error.
 
I don't consider two of the primary issues to be real issues at all. The two are RotTR and the random "bad performance" complaints. RotTR looks like a game issue and the bad performance is almost always an issue with the user's configuration.
 
lol coil whine at high FPS? that's a typical and absolutely normal behavior of about EVERY single card in the market since.. hmm.? always?.. this will happen with every card at above 900FPS or so.. this is a typical behavior in game menus without vsync, games cinematic or intro movies or games that run at that stupidly high amount of FPS.. best way to test it fast it's with 3dmark Ice Storm test, as those easily run above 1000FPS.
 
For what it's worth, sample size of 1, my EVGA SC has no coil whine, no problems with the fan, and OCs to 2.05Ghz no problem at 45% fan speed. The fan is essentially not audible outside my quiet fractal r5 case.
 
FWIW, in a couple of those threads I helped out the OP, and it wasn't the card that was the issue.
 
Did you actually read those posts, some are not even dealing with the card, like doom.

"I got it working. Apparently one of the files was corrupt. I revalidated game cache integrity and now it works fine :p Thanks!"

Oh arestavo beat me to it.

EVGA is a good company and the only one headquartered in the US. Pretty fucked up you'd have bogus posts about them.
 
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You gotta remember that switching out a video card means a lot of other "issues" will be caused by the mere fact of swapping the old card out and the new card in, even if the new card isn't part of the problem. Statistically, working on computers results in "problems" for a certain percentage of users, no matter what was done to it. I take these issue reports with a grain of salt until the initial wave of upgrades is complete. The buying frenzy is still in full swing right now, so problems will be common (nobody posts in forums when everything works unless it's for benchmarking).
 
Sure, when I popped my 1080 in I unplugged my USB3 hard drive. In reassembly I plugged it into the wrong USB port, which somehow caused all sorts of problems-- my motherboard wouldn't even post. 10 minutes of methodical troubleshooting and the problem was fixed, but many people just don't have that sort of thing in them.

I'd still love to know why it works in one port and not another, though... my best guess is simply a bad port, hardware problem.
 
As said above, nearly all those posts are inexperienced gamers with no clue how to install a driver, troubleshoot a crash or verify a Steam game's integrity mixed in with run-of-the-mill GPU quirks like coil whine at high FPS.

When people on this forum start documenting hardware defects and reproducible software problems, then I'll pay it some mind. Until then, I'm chalking this up to PEBKAC and general stupidity.
 
I have an EVGA 1080 SC and haven't had any issues with it. I can't hear the fans at all when gaming and I'm getting the same performance as various benchmarks I've compared against.
 
That's great. You also have to consider that the average person with a fine GPU just uses it while those who have problems with theirs complain on the internet and therefore appear to be a larger group than they really are...
 
The stuttering/tearing mouse scrolling issue is not a problem with the video card itself, it is a G-sync configuration problem since the user has a G-sync monitor and has G-sync enabled on the PC. I noticed the same thing and resolved it by turning V-sync off on everything and having G-Sync enabled for both windowed and full screen applications instead of just full screen applications. That way G-sync is handling everything, from web browsing to gaming.
 
Maybe it's coincidence but out of all graphic cards I have owned over the years the EVGA ones were always the troublemakers, be it reference or custom design. Whenever I had an ASUS or MSI card instead, they just worked.

That being said, after one week with 2 EVGA GTX1080's I experienced the first problems in form of display driver crashes not in games but on the desktop when browsing websites with flash content.
 
Every card I've ever owned has had coil whine if you don't cap fps with vsync in menus, and I've owned dozens of GPUs since the 2D/3D accelerator days. Honestly, just turn vsync or framerate a cap. Running extremely high fps can't be good for your hardware anyway forcing your capacitors to discharge their full rated value continuously.
 
There is nearly zero coil whine on my EVGA 1080. I have to take the side of the case off and stick my ear right to the gpu to hear anything at all while under full load. Just a couple inches away or with the side on case there is no coil whine noise whatsoever.

But yes that protective coating under the screws pissed me off when I was getting ready to install it.
 
I had the plastic under the screws on my 1080sc. I believe its a 1.5 hex wrench i used to get them out. After taking the first plate off and having a pain in the ass time getting the screws back in i just loosened the 4 screws on the other 3 plates and was able to pull the plastic out from around them. Yes, i know there might be a small amount of plastic left inside where they simply screwed the plate down, but i was more worried about stripping out the threads.
 
I have a brand new Intel 6850k answer 2 EVga GTX 1080s in sli and have No problems, they overclock like crazy.




 
So I have the 1080 FE from EVGA overclocked to 2.05 and do not have any issues (other than needing to have a very aggressive fan profile to sustain those speeds).
 
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