EVGA Blames Faulty Soldering for RTX 3090 Failures in Amazon’s New World

The New World closed beta test showed off what Amazon’s upcoming MMORPG has in store, but it wasn’t a perfect run. A few months ago, we started hearing reports of new EVGA RTX 3090 video cards getting bricked when playing the game. Amazon denied that their game was at fault in any way, and EVGA was quick to offer a replacement for the now useless cards.

But, the question remained: What caused this? New World is a new game, but the specs it needs to run are nowhere close to taxing the RTX 3090. Many theories were thrown around online, one of the most notable of which blamed EVGA’s fan controller.

EVGA responded by saying that the problem wasn’t the fans but faulty soldering. In an interview with PCWorld, a spokesperson from EVGA revealed that 24 dead RTX 3090’s which were returned were placed under an x-ray analysis.

The results pointed to “poor workmanship” on the soldering around the MOSFET circuits as the physical cause of the repeated failures. The company followed up quickly by stating that the failure rate was “significantly less than 1 percent of the total” RTX 3090s the company had produced.

The poor soldering wouldn’t have been enough to cause the cards to brick, but the New World beta didn’t have a frame rate limiter on menus or loading screens, which could lead to cards jumping from a normal 100fps to a whopping 800fps.

This would result in a massive surge as the card’s processing power spiked, and combined with the faulty soldering, leading to the affected cards overheating.

There have been no new reports of RTX 3090s bricking ever since Amazon added a frame rate limiter on New World’s menu and loading screens.

EVGA also commented on the fan theory, stating very clearly, “In no way, shape, or form is it related to the fan controller.” The spokesperson said that the cause of the strange fan values are due to the i2c bus noise, which would cause third-party monitoring apps to report faulty fan controllers.

EVGA has also issued updates for its micro-controllers and worked with third-party apps to fix this issue.

So, RTX 3090 users should feel safe playing New World now, and if they do happen to run into any issues, they should contact EVGA customer support.