There have been more and more reports circulating around the internet over the last few days reporting that a wide range of Nvidia RTX 3080 and 3090 graphics cards are experiencing crashes to desktop while gaming. A investigation by the igors Lab website has found that the issue may be caused by bad power delivery due to the type of capacitors some third party manufacturers have used in their production. It is theorised that when boosting past 2.0 GHz clock speeds, cards that have excluded MLCC capacitors, Multi Layer Ceramic Chip Capacitors, are more prone to crashes. Teardowns have shown that some cards in the series from third parties only use cheaper POSCAP style capacitors (Conductive Polymer Tantalum Solid Capacitors) on the back of the GPU. Nvidia's founders edition card and more high end cards use a mix of the two types of capacitors. It is being speculated that just having one MLCC capacitor out of the six capacitors on the back of the GPU can negate crashes completely.

Most third party manufacturers have not yet commented on the issue. But on their forums EVGA released the following statement which pretty much confirms the theories that have been circulating.

"During our mass production QC testing we discovered a full 6 POSCAPs solution cannot pass the real world applications testing. It took almost a week of R&D effort to find the cause and reduce the POSCAPs to 4 and add 20 MLCC caps prior to shipping production boards, this is why the EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 FTW3 series was delayed at launch. There were no 6 POSCAP production EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 FTW3 boards shipped.

But, due to the time crunch, some of the reviewers were sent a pre-production version with 6 POSCAP’s, we are working with those reviewers directly to replace their boards with production versions.
EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 XC3 series with 5 POSCAPs + 10 MLCC solution is matched with the XC3 spec without issues"

What does this mean for people who already have received their cards? There has been no word regarding a recall just yet. But If you are experiencing crashes a slight underclock may help. Likely some kind of BIOs upgrade to affected cards will utilise a similar fix to patch the problem, but will disappointingly slow down your cards boost clock in the process.

For those like myself who have their card on pre-order if you can confirm your chosen card has MLCC capacitors you should be relatively safe. If your card only contains POSCAP capacitors you would be better off cancelling your order, and waiting to see if this issue is fixable without underclocking or having a product recall.

Link to Igors Lab Article on the Issue
EVGA Forum Statement​

 

[CTR640]

I think Nvdia feels threatened. The Next gen consoles are very powerful machines. Price to performance on them can't be beat. The 30 series announcement was right before console pre orders so they are obviously trying to compete with them more then AMD's RDNA 2 pc gpus.

Consoles are a better value then getting a standalone 3070. If your only concerned with games you get cpu, gpu, ram, controller all for $500 compared to $500 just for one pc component the gpu. The fact that Nvdia had to lie this bad to try to push as many units tells me they are threatened.

Im interested in AMD's offering how it compares to 30 series gpus. They have a chance to not screw up like Nvidia and get more praise as long as the hardware is Excellent.

The only one true reason why I'll not buy any console is because of no native support for mouse/keyboard. I can not handle any controller
But for GTA I like to install mods so yeah, PC for me.

And nVidia hasn't been very price-friendly so consoles are more enticing to a certain amount of people because of what you said indeed. nVidia shouldn't have lied, simple. It beats me why the heck they lied aside being threatened. In fact, I'm very sure I'll not be interested in their next launch of the RTX40 because of botters and scalpers of course, the lies.

I hope AMD will kick nVidia in the butt when they release RX6000 series for PC.

 

[Kaioh]

Just getting your hands on one of these cards is enough of a shit-show as it is.

 

[realtimesave]

this is why you don't buy these day one . let the guinea pigs pay their ridiculous prices first and be the beta testers

I bought my 2080 Ti day one, no problems whatsoever. However this time around, yeah. I didn't buy one of these though. After buying a $1200 graphics card 2 years ago and barely even scratching its surface, really no need to upgrade. Next upgrade that would be relevent would be: Core i9 with 10 cores (forgot the model number 10900k or some ridiculous number feel free to correct me if you feel it is at all necessary I don't), new motherboard for the socket whatever that one uses, and 3090 (why bother with the 3080 when there's a 3090, I am not poor by any means). But right now I'm running core i7 8700k or something (yeah I do forget what I run so sue me) and 64GB ram with 2080 Ti from evga. Really really sweet system and I'm blown away what you can buy these days for another couple of grand.

I'm going to hold out another 8 years before I upgrade, this system is bomb.