A few months ago, reports began surfacing online of brand new EVGA RTX 3090 video cards getting bricked during New World's closed beta test. Amazon denied that it was in any way New World's fault for destroying these brand new thousand-dollar video cards, and EVGA was quick to offer free replacements to anyone affected by the issue.
The problem was, nobody knew exactly what the issue was. New World is a new game, but its technical requirements were nowhere near high enough to push an RTX 3090 to its limit. Theories abound online, with one popular theory blaming EVGA's fan controller.
EVGA, however, says that it wasn't the fan controller but faulty soldering that led to so many RTX 3090's meeting an untimely demise. In an interview with PCWorld, an EVGA spokesperson revealed that 24 dead RTX 3090's returned to the manufacturer were placed under x-ray analysis and that ultimately led to the company blaming "poor workmanship" on the soldering around the MOSFET circuits as the physical cause of repeated catastrophic failures.
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EVGA said that the failure rate was still "significantly less than 1 percent of the total" number of RTX 3090's the company has produced.
The poor soldering on its own wouldn't have necessarily killed the cards, but New World's beta didn't institute a frame rate limiter on menus or loading screens, sometimes leading cards to jump from a cool 100 fps to over 800 fps. This would cause a massive power surge as the card's processing spiked, and when combined with the poor soldering caused affected cards to overheat.
No new reports of failed RTX 3090s have surfaced ever since Amazon instituted a frame rate limiter on New World's menus and loading screens.
EVGA also addressed the fan controller theory, saying, “In no way shape, or form, is it related to the fan controller." The spokesperson blamed the strange fan values on i2c bus noise which caused third-party monitoring apps to report faulty fan controllers. EVA has since issued updates to its micro-controller and worked with third-party apps to fix this issue.
At this point, RTX 3090 owners should feel safe in playing New World if they so choose, and if they do run into any issues to contact EVGA customer support.
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