There is nothing to be surprised about. Previously, once every few years, an incorrectly assembled series appeared, where one strip of the heat-conducting pad was missing, and the manufacturer announced this and exchanged the cards for all those interested. At the time of the covid – when first demand and prices skyrocketed due to domestic residence and work, then due to mining – producers go to quantity, apparently employ a number of inexperienced part-time workers and release sick “covid” cards.
Perhaps under the influence of pictures of the card with a latex sleeve, the other two users decided to remove the heatsink on their overheating graphics. An unpleasant surprise awaited both of them. Obamaprism3 posted an introductory photo of Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition. Its installer fitted a heat-conducting pad to cool the memory so “well” that it hit the edges of three (out of four) memory modules with one end and the corner (and about 15-20% of the area) of the GPU with the other end.
It’s hard to say how stress tests and output checks work. Today’s GPUs have temperature sensors scattered over most of the area, just as each memory chip reports its own temperature sensor, so different sensors would have to report diametrically different temperatures during the stress test. According to the user, the card reported 110 ° C (which is the limit, then the protection is underclocked or intervened to prevent the hardware from being exceeded and damaged) and the fan rotated 100%. It is quite surprising that the manufacturer did not capture such significantly (and in several respects) anomalous behavior. Thus, the error occurred both at the assembly stage and at the testing / output inspection stage, if any at present.
The second user (kamaloo92) recorded a temperature of 110 ° C on the memories of the Asus RTX 3080 Ti TUF OC card. After removing the heatsink, he found that one row of memory chips (four) was completely missing the heat-conducting pad. In this case, it was enough to buy and add, there was no need to clean the GPU and PCB from smudged and baked-on remnants of a poorly fitted strip.
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