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The GeForce RTX 3080 was expected to be NVIDIA’s latest and greatest consumer graphics card so much so that it was quickly grabbed by bots when it launched. However, consumers who rushed to get one may now be regretting their rush. Reports of card failure under various conditions and heavy loads are flooding the internet and some tech experts and a graphics card manufacturer have weighed what could be the cause of this unfortunate mystery.
Like any electronic part, graphics cards use capacitors and a group of them is used to regulate the voltage that passes through the card. When capacitors don’t adequately filter out high-frequency junk, graphics cards tend to become unstable and crash. That’s probably why the common denominator among the reports is boosting the GPU clock to 2 GHz or higher.
Igor’s lab investigated various RTX 3080 cards, as well as NVIDIA specifications, and theorized that the type and combination of capacitors used for this purpose may be the cause of the instability. The NVIDIA specification allows the use of two types of capacitors, cheaper large area POSCAPs and smaller and more expensive MLCCs. As you would expect, different manufacturers, including NVIDIA, used different combinations of them.
The most unstable combination is no combination at all, using POSCAP for all six capacitor “slots”. Even a slot with MLCC, which should pack 10 into a package, would be enough to stabilize the card as in the case of an MSI Gaming X Trio. NVIDIA’s own Founders Edition card used two blocks, but the best of all is probably ASUS ‘TUF RTX 3080, which uses nothing but MLCC.
The research in no way rules out POSCAPs entirely, only that it may not be sufficient on its own to handle the higher loads of the GeForce RTX 3080. Unfortunately, since these issues lie at the deepest levels of hardware, those Those who have already purchased affected cards have no choice but to lock their cards at lower, stable clock speeds.
