Some users are complaining of GeForce RTX 2080 Ti cards dying

The dust hasn't even settled on Nvidia's new GeForce RTX series graphics cards, but already there are numerous complaints on various forums of a range of issues, from crashes and blue screen errors, to even cards outright dying. Even more frustrating for early adopters, the complaints seem mostly centered on the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, which is the most expensive RTX card of the bunch.

There are multiple threads related to GeForce RTX 2080 Ti issues on Nvidia's own forums and Reddit. Digital Threads wrangled a bunch of them, noting that users have been complaining about dead and dying cards for weeks, and that several threads have more than 100 comments detailing different issues.

Is there really a problem, though? If so, that would be concerning—it's not unreasonable to expect that a $1,200 GPU (Founders Edition) would be engineered to perfection, or at least close to it. At the very least, we wouldn't expect so many different complaints to crop up so quickly after launch.

The 2080 Ti retail availability was already delayed, and even now supply of the cards is extremely tight. Is there enough demand for $1,200 extreme gaming GPUs to keep most models backordered? Perhaps. It could also be that Turing and the large TU102 GPU in particular are experiencing some teething pains.

It's impossible for us to verify all of the complaints. The general disdain for the RTX launch by some gamers, thanks to the high price (compared to Pascal), also means the potential for trolling is higher. That said, in one of the threads, a customer care agent for Nvidia said the company was able to reproduce the BSOD error that some users are seeing.

"We were able to get a repro of this today. We still need help from you all. We need to confirm the BSOD signature matches the same issue being reported in this thread," ManuelGuzmanNV said.

He went on to give users instructions on how to collect and share the full kernel dump file so that Nvidia can troubleshoot the issue. In a followup post, Manuel responded to a user complaining about a similar issue on a non-Ti variant, telling him "most users here seem to be reporting on 2080 Ti... so you may have a different issue."

Separately, Nvidia told our friends at TomsHardware that "it's not an increasing number of users" who are seeing issues, adding "it's not broad... We are working with each user individually like we always do," Nvidia said.

Paul Lilly

Paul has been playing PC games and raking his knuckles on computer hardware since the Commodore 64. He does not have any tattoos, but thinks it would be cool to get one that reads LOAD"*",8,1. In his off time, he rides motorcycles and wrestles alligators (only one of those is true).

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