Because of the multiple reports about Nvidia RTX 3080 cards suddenly crashing, PC builders are now attempting to figure out how many capacitors are in the newly released GPU.
Last Friday, concerned users stumbled upon a statement made for the crashes: a website named Igor’s Lab has speculated that Nvidia’s partners were budgeting out on the capacitors used in the RTX 3080s. Over the weekend, the theory has spread out, and numerous outlets have cited Igor’s Lab to publish the headlines.
A day after, it seems that there might have been some actual evidence; that the capacitors could have caused the cards to crash. On Saturday, EVGA weighed in on the RTX 3080 capacitor issue, further citing its issues with the capacitor layout that is initially used in the RTX 3080 cards.
However, the company claims that it has never shipped the original structure to the customers. Furthermore, EVGA also explained that although a design with six POSCAPs “cannot pass the testing of the real-world application,” it then later tried a system with only four POSCAPs and 20 MLCC caps that work even better.
“It is false that POSCAP capacitors independently could cause a hardware crash.” – Gigabyte.
Tom’s Hardware explains that there are typically two types of capacitors found beneath a modern GPU chip: MLCC and POSCAPs. Both the capacitors are reportedly having pros and cons; MLCC is much smaller but performs way better at higher clock speeds. POSCAPs are more significant but are not as good when it runs at high clock speeds.
At this juncture, it is not yet certain whether the capacitors are the ones that cause the said crashed; however, the demand had undoubtedly gotten the industry to reply: Gigabyte, MSI, and Zotac have all issued the statements all claiming that the capacitors are not the problem and that the new Nvidia drivers can address any stability issues that happened in the cards. Nvidia says it, too, and then releases a new driver today that addresses the stability issues with the RTX 30 GPU line.
PC World reports one of its cards that was previously crashing doesn’t do it after the update. The outlet had a pre-production EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 FTW3 for review, which had the original capacitors instead of shipped out to retailers. PC World notes that there’s a tradeoff: the update “slightly limits” the top clock speed on the GPU boost.
It has also been reported that one of its cards that cashed previously doesn’t happen again after the update. The outlet then had a pre-production EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 FTW3 for a review, which had the original capacitors rather than the ones that were shipped out to the retailers. It was also noted that there was a tradeoff: the update “slightly limits” the clock speed of the GPU boost.
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