EVGA Confirms Poor PCB Solder Design Killed Its GeForce RTX 3090 Graphics Cards

EVGA has finally confirmed the root cause of damage to its GeForce RTX 3090 graphics cards and this is related to the design of the PCB.

EVGA Confirms Bad PCB Solder Design Killed Its GeForce RTX 3090 Graphics Cards, Lot Affected Less Than 1%

In July, several users playing Amazon’s latest MMO New World began reporting that their brand new EVGA GeForce RTX 3090 graphics cards were dying while playing the game. the card would end up being permanently damaged. This led to major RMAs and an initial investigation showing that the problem could be a bad PWM fan controller which led to abnormal functions. The developers of New Worlds had to issue a quick frame cap to alleviate the issue, but it looks like the issue is a bad design flaw from the get-go.

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Early theories that EVGA’s cooling system was to blame are also incorrect, the spokesperson said.

“In no way is it related to the fan controller,” he said.

All of the boards were earlier production boards made in 2020. Based on x-ray analysis, they appear to have a “poor finish” when soldering around the board’s MOSFET circuits that feed the impacted boards.

The company declined to say how many GeForce RTX 3090 cards it sold, but called this small batch significantly less than 1% of the total.

PC World – Gordon Mah Ung

In a recent interview with Gordon Mah Ung of PC World, it is reported that the issue arose with the initial batch of EVGA GeForce RTX 3090 graphics cards which were produced in 2020. All cards manufactured before 2021 had poor solder around the MOSFET on the board. circuits and this is the main culprit. Of course, a bad fan controller, if there really was one, could also increase the overall damage to the board, but if a MOSFET goes up, your board is pretty much down.

It took EVGA about 2 months to figure this out. It just shows the state of quality control at EVGA where the company failed to uncover this major design flaw in 2020 and let them ship to the retail segment. This means that when EVGA changed things with the 2021 batch, they might have been aware of the issue, but since only Amazon’s New World broke the cards, the company silently waited until the damage is caused. The representative did not comment on the sales figures, but it is reported that the total lot was less than 1% of their supply of the RTX 30 series.