TECH NEWS – If you have a GeForce RTX 3000 or 4000 series graphics card made by Gigabyte, you’d better be careful…

Louis Rossmann has reported that the PCB of the affected Gigabyte cards is prone to cracking due to a design flaw in the affected area. The cracks in the video card damage the PCIe lanes, which prevent data movement and render the GPU unusable. Since it is not an isolated, one-off case, many have contacted Gigabyte. The company, however, was not inclined to comply with RMA requests: it did not provide affected users with a replacement card! All such requests were refused.

Gigabyte explained the refusals by saying they believed the graphics cards had failed due to physical damage and were not responsible for the failure. In the pictures below, you can see where the cracks are marked with a red arrow, and those who sell GPUs on eBay, for example, mark the cards similarly. You can fix it yourself if you’re not bad with your hands and have the right tools.

We’re not kidding: here is a step-by-step guide to the repair process, but we recommend that you don’t do DIY if you’re not an expert, and leave it to someone who does it for a living because they might be able to save the graphics card that you would most likely render unusable in a short time. The other manufacturers (Asus, MSI…) don’t have this problem, so only Gigabyte is affected, so they should do something because as the RTX 4000 series becomes more widespread (especially the RTX 4060 could be a mainstream card with more competitive pricing than the RTX 3060!), there is a better chance that customers could buy GPUs from the company so that more people could be in trouble later.

The practical solution would be a general product recall, but Gigabyte would lose a lot on that, and they are not inclined to do that, so the best they could do is it on consumer protection orders. We don’t see much chance of that either, so if you buy a new Nvidia card, you should choose another manufacturer…

Source: WCCFTech