Not that long ago EVGA released their GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 FTW graphics cards. Soon after the release customers were reporting a lot of overheating and even in some cases the card catching fire! That is definitely not something EVGA wants to see. This issues is known by EVGA and it turns out many cards have bad MOSFETs that overheat. While there have been plenty of photos of the after-damage of cards catching fire no one has actually been able to catch it happening live, until now.
If you check out the video above you can see about the at about the 20 second mark that the card does indeed ignite. Now as we noticed as others that this user did not have the PCI-Express power connectors plugged in. Here is what he had to say:
“it wasn’t until I unplugged all the other peripherals and power to each that my computer finally powered on then the card fried with no power connected. Now whether the card has power or not while still being connected to the pci slot, that should not have caused the card to spark and fry. I Googled plenty online articles to make sure that was not the case but some says it will and the majority says it should have fried.”
As we noted EVGA is aware of this issue and is offering a physical fix, which is extra thermal pads, that are available for free. EVGA also released the following statement recently.
“The test used in the referenced review from Toms Hardware (Germany) is running under Furmark, an extreme usage case, as most overclockers know. We believe this is a good approach to have some idea about the graphics card limit, and the thermal performance under the worst case scenario. EVGA has performed a similar qualification test during the design process, at a higher ambient temperature (30C in chamber) with a thermal coupler probe directly contacting the key components and after the Toms Hardware (Germany) review, we have retested this again. The results in both tests show the temperature of PWM and memory is within the spec tolerance under the same stress test, and is working as originally designed with no issues.
During our recent testing, we have applied additional thermal pads between the backplate and the PCB and between the baseplate and the heatsink fins, with the results shown below. We will offer these optional thermal pads free of charge to EVGA owners who want to have a lower temperature. These thermal pads will be ready soon; and customers can request them starting Monday, October 24th, 2016. Also, we will work with Toms Hardware to do a retest.”
