WTF?! A new GeForce RTX 3090 card is going to cost you a fortune, especially in today’s market, but that expenditure is quickly forgotten about once you’re playing games in 4K at well over 60fps. However, something that will dampen the enthusiasm is said card running hot—230 degrees hot. The reason? A condom-like finger cot sitting inside the expensive component.
Netherlands-based Redditor Antony ter Horst (antonyjeweet) bought the RTX 3090 Founders Edition two weeks ago. Strangely, the memory temperatures were hitting 230 degrees Fahrenheit / 110 degrees Celsius within a minute of use, causing it to downclock.
Antony decided the best course of action would be to replace the thermal pads, so he opened up his card and made the unexpected discovery: sitting over the memory chips was a small latex-like object filled with a substance.
The item in question was a finger cot filled with thermal padding. Presumably, the glove fell off a line worker during the assembly process and became sealed inside the component.
Removing the offending item addressed the card’s overheating issues. “Now they [temperatures] stay at 86c max after 1.5 [hours] of stress testing. Also the core dropped 10c (from 75 to +/-65c after stress testing),” Antony wrote.
Nvidia originally refused to honor the card’s warranty because Antony had taken it apart, but the company changed its tune after learning about the unwanted extra addition to the RTX 3090.
“Nvidia told me at first I lost my warranty. But after seeing this they said we will give you warranty (got that on mail). No swap or anything. If it works fine just keep it, if not, contact us and we will fix it,” Antony explained.
This isn’t a unique incident. As reported by Igor’s Lab, others have found foreign objects inside graphics cards, including screws, foil strips, dirt, and all the plastic covers that should have been removed during assembly.
Nvidia doubtlessly won’t be happy about the incident, but with factory workers under even more pressure than usual due to the chip shortage and Covid-related problems, mistakes like this are likely to happen.
https://www.techspot.com/news/90896-nvidia-rtx-3090-owner-finds-finger-glove-inside.html
