Here’s why PC builders are demanding to know how many capacitors are in the RTX 3080 – The Verge

EVGA weighed in on the RTX 3080 capacitor debate on Saturday, citing its own concerns with the capacitor layout it originally used in its RTX 3080 cards, although the business claims it never delivered the initial design to clients.

Thats right: capacitors. On Friday, concerned purchasers stumbled upon one theory for the crashes: a website called Igors Lab hypothesized that Nvidias partners were cheaping out on the capacitors utilized in their third-party RTX 3080s. And over the weekend, that theory spread: various outlets mentioned Igors Lab to publish headings like “NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Stability Woes Traced To Cheap Capacitors” and “Capacitor issues are causing RTX 3080/3090 crashes.”

Following numerous reports of third-party Nvidia RTX 3080 cards crashing, PC builders are now trying to determine the number of capacitors are in their brand-new GPU.

On Friday, concerned purchasers stumbled upon one theory for the crashes: a website called Igors Lab speculated that Nvidias partners were cheaping out on the capacitors used in their third-party RTX 3080s. And over the weekend, that theory spread: many outlets mentioned Igors Lab to release headlines like “NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Stability Woes Traced To Cheap Capacitors” and “Capacitor concerns are causing RTX 3080/3090 crashes.”

At this point, we do not actually know whether capacitors are triggering these crashes, but the need has actually certainly gotten the market to react: MSI, Gigabyte, and Zotac have all issued declarations declaring the capacitors are not the problem, which new Nvidia drivers can attend to any stability concerns in the cards. Thats Nvidias position too, and it released a brand-new driver today to resolve stability problems with the RTX 30 GPU line.

A day later on, it appeared there might actually be some evidence that capacitors could have triggered the cards to crash. EVGA weighed in on the RTX 3080 capacitor debate on Saturday, mentioning its own concerns with the capacitor design it initially used in its RTX 3080 cards, although the business claims it never delivered the original layout to clients. In that note, EVGA explained that while a style with 6 POSCAPs “can not pass the real life applications testing,” it later on tried a style with four POSCAPs and 20 MLCC caps that worked much better.

PC World reports among its cards that was previously crashing doesnt do it after the upgrade. The outlet had a pre-production EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 FTW3 for evaluation, which had the original capacitors rather of the ones shipped out to merchants. PC World keeps in mind that theres a tradeoff: the update “a little limits” the leading clock speed on the GPU boost.

As Toms Hardware discusses, there are generally two kinds of capacitors found below a modern-day GPUs chip: MLCC and POSCAPS. Both capacitors reportedly have cons and pros; MLCC is smaller sized but performs better at greater clock speeds. POSCAPS are larger however are not as good when running at high clock speeds.

” It is false that POSCAP capacitors individually could cause a hardware crash.”– Gigabyte