Rut-roh! RTX3080 Crashes

News is coming out of games crashing and blue screens with the new 3080s.
Have been reading up on this all morning long. I am not going to try to explain here, but instead will offer a couple of links to cast light on the issue that HOPEFULLY, DS is aware of.

I will only add that those getting the nVidia RTX 3080 FE are safe.

Igor's Lab first found the problem after the issue was starting to flood Reddit. Here are the two links for the details.

1] Igor's Lab Info

2] JayzTwoCents Video

Yeah, but DS says "DIGITAL STORM WILL USE A TOP BRAND NAME GRAPHICS CARD FROM THE LIKES OF ASUS, EVGA, PNY, MSI, ETC..."
That is pretty much any of them could be used.

It seems EVGA realized the problem and now only will ship a good card.
Also seems from the info only two used 6 PosCaps, which is the bad set-up and those two were Gigabyte and Zotac. All other AIB's used a combination of the two capacitor types, which means you would be safe.

Some say they could fix it with a driver or bios update, either way, that only reduces the max clock on the card that GPU Boost can take the card to. If this is the fix, then you would NOT be getting the card you paid for.

So it will be very interesting to see how this is handled. IF an inferior AIB card (card built according to nVidia specs but at the bare minimum level) is used by DS, who will fix or be responsible for the issues?

Luckily, only a small percentage of people were able to get their hands on a 3080 first release card and perhaps the AIBs have had time to yell, "Stop the Press" and change how they build the card to make it stable. Could be a delay in refilling stock.
Egads, what a mess!

Edited by fwfdfireman - 26 Sep 2020 at 12:02pm

Hi Everyone! We are aware of this and are looking into it.

So glad you guys are aware. I was just reading that all cards can experience a crash. So expect some driver updates. The ones that are really experiencing this are cards that get overclocked to push the boost limit over the 2 Ghz mark.

At that, even leaving them at stock or slightly overclocked can have a crash, infrequently, but can happen here and there. Again, those issues can and will probably be addressed and fixed with a driver update somewhere down the road.

Thx for chiming in Stellar. And I agree with you Snaike, I too have never jumped on a first release of anything. Unfortunaley, the card I originally spec'd was harder to find than snake boobies. Hence, I had to opt for the 3080. Not too worried about it at this time as more info is produced every day on the initial reports.

The issue has been fixed. According to Gear Seekers, they found that there were absolutely NO crashes on a Linux based system. Crashes only occurred on Windows systems. Hence, nVidia dove in to the issue and that's when they released the new drivers a short time later.

I think they even released an additional driver update. So far, there are no more reports of crashes from what I can see.

So, issue fixed......... no reduction in boost clock and it was NOT a capacitor issue as originally suggested.

All is good now, so game on.

Edited by fwfdfireman - 01 Oct 2020 at 12:31pm

Now that “capacitor-gate” is winding down, it seems a simple driver update solved the problem for most people.

The issue isnt completely figured out yet, but it seems like it was a combination of some reviewers getting pre production cards and bad drivers. The problem also seems to be with bad overclocks because apparently the cards loose stability fast over 2Ghz, however I also heard that the problem was less with the clock speed and had more to do with how quickly the clock speed increases.

Luckily, the architecture is so good that overclocking beyond nvidea’s auto thermal overclocking is not really necessary right now and by the time these cards start to age, I’m sure the issue will be resolved.

Nvidea and partners spent years developing these cards and they are a big leap forward so its very unlikely the problems we are hearing about will still be problems in a few months.