TECH NEWS – Video cards can suffer from a similar problem to TV screens, and no, we don’t mean that our OLED displays are somehow affected…

Even with OLED displays, there is a possibility that if something stays on our screen for too long, it can burn in. For example, if our taskbar has a lot of icons in one place for a long time, it can burn in in such a way that in extreme cases it can be seen even when it is turned off. Video cards can also suffer from this problem. But you wouldn’t really think of them when you think of photodegradation (although in this case it’s not sunlight that’s causing the distortion…).

The back of a video card can also change over time, and two people on Reddit have reported this. The discoloration closely matches the patterns you would expect from an adjacent memory module set with RGB lighting. It appears that RGB lighting has affected the back of cards, and not just one brand. This has been reported for MSI, Gigabyte and Asus. However, the culprit is more likely to be the RGB LED associated with the memory.

We’ll try to explain this without getting too far into physics. If you leave a T-shirt in the sun for too long, it will fade from UV light. The same thing can happen to the back of a video card, but fortunately for us, it doesn’t happen that often, since many PCs nowadays have RGB lighting (but we’d rather have good hardware than fancy hardware), and by that time more people would be complaining about it. So the problem is more likely that some memory modules have poor quality or faulty LEDs and emit light that they shouldn’t.

So who knows which graphics cards might be affected, but we weren’t expecting this kind of burn-in. In any case, it shows that using LEDs can be beautiful, so there is a downside. Of course, it’s subjective who likes his PC to light up like a Christmas tree on a cold December evening…

Source: PCGamer, Reddit, Reddit