Hot potato: We all know graphics playing cards have gotten greater and heavier in recent times. Graphics card sag is beginning to plague players shopping for high-end customized fashions from corporations like Gigabyte. While most points might be prevented with anti-sag brackets, this should not be on the consumer’s head, particularly when the graphics card in query has design flaws that make it susceptible to break with out aftermarket equipment.
A drooping graphics card might be annoying, however it’s normally straightforward to repair. However, because of the more and more giant cooling options put in on trendy GPUs, PCB cracking can even happen in poorly designed graphics playing cards. Several Gigabyte graphics playing cards have suffered bodily harm in latest months, and the corporate seems to have no real interest in serving to affected clients, stories well-known restore knowledgeable and right-to-repair advocate Louis Rossmann.
Specifically, a number of fashions of Gigabyte’s RTX 30 and 40 sequence graphics playing cards look like affected by this challenge. A fellow restore specialist instructed Rothman they processed not less than a dozen playing cards and supplied a number of pictures as an instance the issue. It’s additionally price noting that eBay appears to be stuffed with listings for Gigabyte playing cards that had been rejected in the course of the RMA course of (or just offered components as a result of they had been out of guarantee) as a result of their PCBs had been cracked.
As might be seen from the image above, the crack just isn’t straightforward to detect, so the proprietor pointed it out with an arrow sticker. Very regarding, most of them appear to be close to the top of the PCIe connector, subsequent to the PCIe locking tab.
Several copper wires present energy to some elements on the circuit board and move via the related space, so a crack can destroy these connections and trigger the graphics card to not work correctly. It in all probability does not assist that Gigabyte made the PCB cutouts close to the locking tabs very giant.
Repairs are fairly tough, normally with a ten% to twenty% success price, however because of Jérémie (contact Rossmann’s unbiased restore specialists on this matter), there may be now a information on how you can do it. The wiki particulars the restore course of for any unbiased restore technician or concerned with DIY repairing a broken Gigabyte card. Another downside is that it is by no means secure to put in the playing cards in query horizontally, however not less than it is attainable to get a few of them working once more.
You can in all probability stop any cracks in your graphics card through the use of an anti-sag bracket, which many producers, together with Gigabyte, already provide with some RTX 40-series playing cards. Sadly, nevertheless, Gigabyte hasn’t acknowledged what seems to be a design flaw that might simply make some playing cards unusable for his or her house owners. We’re hoping the corporate ultimately decides to institute a returns and change program, prefer it did with final 12 months’s explosive PSUs, however we’ll have to attend and see.
