Early RTX 2080 Ti adopters reporting cards heading for early grave

Nvidia’s new RTX 2080 Ti may be suffering from abnormally high failure rates. 

Many early adopters have taken to forums and Reddit to complain that their new cards have suddenly started producing display artefacts, various errors, and random crashes.

According to German tech site ComputerBase, manufactures are reporting significantly higher RMA rates than normal, though it still accounts for less than 10% of all cards sold so far.

It’s not known what’s causing the issues, but Tom’s Hardware speculates that it may be due to overheating of the GDDR6 VRAM chips. On the reference cards, these chips are placed close to internal power supply tracks embedded into the PCB, which run quite warm themselves. ComputerBase reports that the issue does seem more prevalent in partner cards, which tend to use cheaper cooling options.

In addition to the issues with the cards themselves, some users are also reporting of long wait times for RMA replacements due to supply issues. Nvidia themselves later confirmed in their forums.

So far, there are no confirmed reports of issues with the vanilla RTX 2080, or the 2070.