EVGA Identifies This Root Cause For GeForce RTX 3090 Failures In New World MMORPG
After conducting a series of tests and close examinations, EVGA believes it has discovered the reason why some of its GeForce RTX 3090 graphics cards were giving up the ghost when running Amazon's New World MMORPG. What it boils down to, if EVGA's analysis is correct, is sloppy soldering on certain areas that would not necessarily be visible to the naked eye.
For those who were affected, this had been a perplexing and frustrating issue. And to exacerbate the situation, not only is the GeForce RTX 3090 an expensive graphics card, it is also in short supply like practically every other GPU. Getting your hands on one means being very lucky with your timing (Best Buy had a couple of recent inventory drops), or paying a premium over MSRP.
Some GeForce RTX 3090 Cards Failed When Playing Amazon's New World MMO
In case you missed it, what happened is that multiple gamers reported having issues with their pricey graphics cards when participating in Amazon's New World beta. Complaints flooded Reddit, and it seemed most of them were linked to EVGA's GeForce RTX 3090 FTW3 Ultra.
This raised speculation over the lack of a frame rate limiter within the MMO's menu system. This essentially gave GPUs the green light to stomp the pedal to the metal, and some cards apparently had trouble with this. Amazon subsequently updated the game to include a frame rate limiter, but what about those failed cards?
EVGA Discovers Poor Soldering Is To Blame
EVGA offered to replace them, and it also investigated the matter. The folks at EVGA spoke with PCWorld's esteemed Gordon Mah Ung, telling him that their engineers discovered "poor workmanship" on soldering points around the MOSFET circuits, on cards that failed. This was seen under X-ray analysis.
As part of its investigation, both EVGA and NVIDIA tapped Amazon to provide them with an earlier copy of the game, without the frame limiter in place. Interestingly, EVGA said it was not able to reproduce the failure. Nevertheless, EVGA is adding some kind of mechanism that will look for the kind of behavior the MMO exhibited in the earlier build, for added protection.
Though there were unconfirmed reports of other cards failing as well, EVGA said the only ones it received were GeForce RTX 3090 units, for which it shipped immediate replacements. EVGA also said that the number of failed cards a lot less than 1 percent of however many it shipped.
Incidentally, EVGA says it not received any further reports of card failures after the frame limiter was added. So hopefully between that and better workmanship on cards going forward, this issue will not rear its ugly head again.
