Nvidia RTX 4090 Founders Edition borked by winged bug that got trapped inside

[midian182]

WTF?! We're used to reading about problems affecting the RTX 4090, but in all fairness to Nvidia, this latest incident could hardly be blamed on Team Green. It seems the culprit was a bug; the literal kind. A winged insect had made its way inside the graphics card, borking the expensive Lovelace product.

YouTube channel NorthWestRepair explained that they were contacted by a customer who wanted a repair for their "brand new" RTX 4090 Founders Edition that was bought at resale without a warranty.

Testing the card revealed that although the fans were blowing and reaching their max speed, no image appeared on the monitor.

What followed next were the standard checks for any obvious problems. It was then time to open up the card and conduct an in-depth examination of the PCB, looking for short circuits, cracks, and faults, checking the BIOS chip for activity, and so on.

Finding no apparent issues, NorthWestRepair moved on to the GPU itself. Desoldering the AD 102 chip revealed something unexpected: the carcass of a winged insect, which appears to have found itself trapped in the unfortunate, and unusual, position between the GPU and PCB pads while the RTX 4090 FE was on the assembly line. The body presumably affected some of the ball grid array (BGA) contacts.

Having discovered what was wrong, NorthWestRepair proceeded to clean and re-ball the GPU before refitting it. He completed the repair process by testing the now fully working card and running some 3Dmark benchmarks.

One might imagine that finding an insect inside a graphics card is a rare occurrence, but NorthWestRepair discovered the same thing inside a Zotac GeForce RTX 3080 Ti AMP Extreme Holo he was repairing just three months ago. The repairer found "what was left" of the insect after it tried "to urinate on a powered device."

Nvidia can't blame bugs of the many-legged kind for every RTX 4090 problem. Last week brought news that one of the cards had self-immolated after proper installation and only one year of use for no obvious reason.

H/t: PC Gamer

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/100496-nvidia-geforce-rtx-4090-founders-edition-borked-bug.html

 

[OortCloud]

He's a master of his craft. He makes re-balling huge BGA chips look so straightforward. Unless the core itself is fried in some way he can pretty much repair any fault on a GPU.

 

[VitalyT]

Where's that bug?

 

[Peter Farkas]

This was brilliant.

 

[d5aqoep]

It speaks about the condition of GPU manufacturing factories.

 

[Burty117]

How did that get through QA though? I know not every GPU is burnt in, normally just a certain amount per batch are run thoroughly in, but every GPU normally gets plugged in and checked for video output.

 

[wiyosaya]

How did that get through QA though? I know not every GPU is burnt in, normally just a certain amount per batch are run thoroughly in, but every GPU normally gets plugged in and checked for video output.

I worked at a couple of different electronics manufacturing companies (an alarm system company and a telephone cost-accounting company), and literally everything each one manufactured was burnt-in.

I forget exactly what they were, but there have been a couple of stories on TS over the last couple of years that I felt would not have encountered the issues the story covered if the manufacturers had burnt-in the boards before shipping them. I get manufacturing processes are excellent these days, but burn-in can catch some issues that would never get caught without it. Would burn-in have caught this, I cannot say, but there's at least a chance that it would have. One would think that a high-end card like this would have a strict QA process, but noooooooo. The excuse is probably "it costs too much."

IMO, its unfortunate that the norm is push out as many cards as you can and F the QA process these days.

 

[Threadcount]

...Normally they do bug testing on the software side, this one must have gotten out...

 

[Hotlynx16]

Had ant get in a PLC card at work and shut the whole unit down for a week!