New World graphics card failures down to dodgy soldering, says EVGA • Eurogamer.net

Back in July, reports began circulating that the beta of Amazon’s MMO New World was bricking pricey EVGA-manufactured RTX 3090 graphics cards. A subsequent statement from Amazon insisted the beta was “safe to play”, and it looks like it were right – EVGA has now investigated the issue, revealing the hardware failures were the result of dodgy soldering.

When reports of card failures began to surface, some users speculated the problem was due to power spikes and overheating caused by uncapped framerates in the New World beta’s menus. While Amazon set about capping the framerate as a precautionary measure, EVGA began replacing affected cards and investigating returns to find out exactly what was going on.

Sharing its findings with PC World, EVGA has now revealed that while it wasn’t able to replicate the issue using a copy of the New World beta, under X-ray analysis the less-than-two-dozen impacted RTX 3090s it received – all originating from an early 2024 production run – displayed “poor workmanship” on the soldering around the MOSFET circuits that powered the cards.

EVGA also dismissed theories suggesting failures were related to RTX 3090 fan controllers, explaining errors some users were seeing resulted from third-party monitoring tools such as HWInfo and GPU-Z incorrectly reporting noise from the i2c bus as the fan controller failing. In total, its says the affected batch of RTX 3090s accounted for less than 1 percent of cards sold.

As for New World, no further reports of card failures surface following Amazon’s decision to cap frame rates in the beta, and the much-delayed MMO is now set to release on 28th September.