Nvidia GTX 1080 & 1070 EVGA Cards Reportedly Catching Fire & Dying Due To VRMs Overheating

[ReaperX22]

Well.. That sucks. Got my pads. Installed. No problem. All looking good. RANDOM BLUE SCREEN OF DEATHHH RAWRRRR. (During a game). Have not been able to get it to turn on since. I dub thee. Dead. Returning to my local retailer.. :\. Might look at the Strix instead... It's a tight fit in the Ncase but it'll work. XD

 

[happymedium]

this is a quote from a mod at Anandtech........


'OK. posting this as a user, but I will get stahlhart to give infractions, if someone goes wild.

First, I have the cards (2 1080's) running at 100% load for months. Never had a problem, however, I had the fan profile turned up.
Second, it was debunked that they catch fire Here: http://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/2691-final-evga-vrm-thermal-torture-test-and-analysis
Third, EVGA says even though they run cooler after the patch, their own testing proved it was impossible to catch fire. But with the thermal pads alone, the whole card runs cooler.

So this whole thing was about a youtube video that was fake (the power plugs were not even connected, and the short was on the motherboard or something.)

So, can we drop this and stop wining that its a problem ? And as for the fans, if you do the bios update or get an advanced RMA, just lower the fans a little to keep the noise down."

end quote.



I went clicked on the link , read what the guy said, watched the video , and I agree its all bullshit.
http://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/2691-final-evga-vrm-thermal-torture-test-and-analysis

The cards may run cooler with pads and a higher fan profile but it was not needed.
The thread was locked and finished over there.

 

[CSI_PC]

Yeah was heavily hyped, mostly by those who are anti Nvidia it feels.

The concern for me until fully tested was the scenario of overclocking and setting power target to max while also reducing fans so they are quiet, and yeah while it would not catch fire my concern was the bank of GDDR5 that was closest to the power stage and effects possibly longer term, but again only if a user max'd power target/overclocked/lowered fans - not something most would do anyway.
That said great analysis by gamersnexus that shows all of this is really not an issue with regards to power stage failing, personally I would just go with pads and quieter fans myself.

And even before the gamersnexus analysis, der8auer was mentioning it was BS it would impact VRM as reported by users and news sites, however no-one was interested in his views (a respected international extreme OCer with extensive Nvidia experience and records to his name at various times in the past) but went all doom on Buildzoid's comment (more experience with AMD).
Cheers

 

[cageymaru]

happymedium

The article had me hook, line, and sinker until they said 200 cards per million come back with defects. I have purchased Chinese, Taiwanese, Malaysian, etc electronics in addition to American products. When they said 200 I knew they were lying out of both front teeth. I have multiple dead monitors with bad Chinese capacitors in them lying around this house and in my other home. I have had many TVs die over the years that weren't very old. The first thing that the power supply articles here on [H]ardocp taught me were to look for good capacitors because the Chinese ones suck due to a lack of Quality Control.

There is an entire thread in the video card section here dedicated to baking video cards in the oven to fix the abhorrent Chinese soldering. EVGA has multiple sales of refurbished cards every year where they try to get rid of returned video cards that they have repaired for one reason or another. Heck here is their B-Stock sales page right here. I bet there are 200 versions of cards on that page.

EVGA went so far as to invite JayZTwoCents to their office to tell him what the problem was, how to install the fix, and to apologize for leaving the VRM pads out of the design when all of the other AIB manufacturers included them. They put out a video showing how much cooler the cards run with them installed.

Now they are trying to do damage control and say that they only have 200 bad cards out of 1,000,000 cards produced? I have some oceanfront property in my bathtub to sell you!

Am I trying to make a stink out of it? No. Could care less really. What I am saying is that it's viral marketing to make you feel better about their products and damage control. EVGA makes good stuff but they aren't perfect. I owned one of their cards in the past and it was wonderful. Really nice aesthetically and worked great. But I'm not stupid. 200 failures out of 1 million? Made in China? GTFO here with that nonsense EVGA.

I would agree that it's probably more of an exploding capacitor issue than a VRM issue. Excessive heat kills caps in addition to the stellar track record of Chinese electronics. Maybe next time they won't cut corners to save a penny. That's what I want to happen. Don't cut corners on quality.

 

[CSI_PC]

happymedium

The article had me hook, line, and sinker until they said 200 cards per million come back with defects. I have purchased Chinese, Taiwanese, Malaysian, etc electronics in addition to American products. When they said 200 I knew they were lying out of both front teeth. I have multiple dead monitors with bad Chinese capacitors in them lying around this house and in my other home. I have had many TVs die over the years that weren't very old. The first thing that the power supply articles here on [H]ardocp taught me were to look for good capacitors because the Chinese ones suck due to a lack of Quality Control.

There is an entire thread in the video card section here dedicated to baking video cards in the oven to fix the abhorrent Chinese soldering. EVGA has multiple sales of refurbished cards every year where they try to get rid of returned video cards that they have repaired for one reason or another. Heck here is their B-Stock sales page right here. I bet there are 200 versions of cards on that page.

EVGA went so far as to invite JayZTwoCents to their office to tell him what the problem was, how to install the fix, and to apologize for leaving the VRM pads out of the design when all of the other AIB manufacturers included them. They put out a video showing how much cooler the cards run with them installed.

Now they are trying to do damage control and say that they only have 200 bad cards out of 1,000,000 cards produced? I have some oceanfront property in my bathtub to sell you!

Am I trying to make a stink out of it? No. Could care less really. What I am saying is that it's viral marketing to make you feel better about their products and damage control. EVGA makes good stuff but they aren't perfect. I owned one of their cards in the past and it was wonderful. Really nice aesthetically and worked great. But I'm not stupid. 200 failures out of 1 million? Made in China? GTFO here with that nonsense EVGA.

I would agree that it's probably more of an exploding capacitor issue than a VRM issue. Excessive heat kills caps in addition to the stellar track record of Chinese electronics. Maybe next time they won't cut corners to save a penny. That's what I want to happen. Don't cut corners on quality.

I think that is being rather unfair in analysis and again there is nothing wrong with the capacitors in terms of excessive heat.
EVGA has consistently said the product and its components are working within their performance envelope and specification, tbh this is why they did not put the pads on or use a more aggressive fan and even in worst case scenario deliberately abusing the use it only then just reached limits.
The reason they are now backtracking in terms of providing pads/fan increase is to get ahead of what became a hyped mob lynch PR disaster, none of it based upon actual facts and fuelled by various users in the wild.

One video was a user fault powering on relying solely on the motherboard for power, the others were more likely bad batch external sourced capacitor component that has nothing to do with heat and yet we have no idea how many are actually affected; some people complaining of issues were experiencing the memory BIOS related problem instead and wrongly associated that behaviour to the heat news.
You link a page going back to 2009, manufacturing processes change even over a 2-3 year cycle for such tech let alone 6 years.
The B-Stock link you provide has; 14x 980ti, 14x 970, 9x 980, not hundreds, and key point about the defective parts per million is that this is a rough description provided by GamersNexus and something is lost in the details as they are dealing with EVGA North America and not global, and I feel it breaks down to individual models and also definition and period for defective rate categories.
I would say EVGA probably has same defective rate as say MSI/ASUS/etc with regards to Nvidia cards even now with these Pascal models.

I am not defending EVGA here and IMO they should 'over-engineer' (quotes as in reality we expect this as standard at these prices) with better than needed cooling solution/power stage/etc (and this has come back to bite them now, rightfully so IMO), but lets not blow this out of proportion a 2nd time.
Cheers

 

[thesmokingman]

Now they are trying to do damage control and say that they only have 200 bad cards out of 1,000,000 cards produced? I have some oceanfront property in my bathtub to sell you!

Without proof to back up their statistics that's clearly an extrapolation that they are using to their advantage.