Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3090 is one of the best graphics cards that money can buy. However, multiple GeForce RTX 3090 graphics cards bit the dust while playing Amazon's New World game. EVGA has launched an investigation into the dead graphics cards and has shared the results with PCWorld.
GeForce RTX 3090 owners went into panic mode when a plethora of user reports claimed that New World was killing graphics cards left and right. Apparently, Amazon Games didn't implement a frame rate limiter in the main menu, which caused graphics cards to malfunction or die prematurely due to the high frame rates. There were alleged reports of Radeon and other Ampere-based SKUs suffering from the same problem, which isn't exclusive to the GeForce RTX 3090.
Amazon Games has since added a frame rate limiter to New World, and there hasn't been any new reports of precipitated deaths. EVGA shipped out replacements to the affected users and collected the bricked graphics cards for X-ray analysis.
Initially, many speculated that the graphics card's fan controller was the culprit for the premature failures. However, an EVGA spokesman has dispelled that theory. According to EVGA, the micro-controller may appear to be not working correctly due to the related noise on the i2c bus. This can cause third-party software, including HWiNFO or GPU-Z erroneously report that the fan controller wasn't working properly. EVGA's in-house Precision X1 software didn't have this problem. Nevertheless, EVGA has released a micro-controller update that will show the fan controller's correct operation on updated versions of the aforementioned third-party tools.
After analyzing the 24 deceased GeForce RTX 3090 graphics cards, the company discovered that real issue was due to "poor workmanship." Apparently, the soldering around the graphics card's MOSFET circuits leaves much to desire.
EVGA claimed that the soldering problem only affects a handful of GeForce RTX 3090 graphics cards that were part of the early production run in 2020. Although EVGA didn't reveal concrete numbers, the company affirmed that the affected batch is less than 1% of all the graphics cards that it has sold.