Youtuber and repairman is overloaded with RTX 4090s with cracked PCBs

Youtuber and repairman NorthridgeFix has received no fewer than 19 RTX 4090 video cards from a single customer. Almost all GPUs had the problem that the PCB was cracked near the mechanism that attaches the cards to the PCIe slot on the motherboard. This type of damage fits in with a trend that has started due to increasingly larger and heavier GPUs. It is not certain what the reason is for the damage with this specific batch of video cards.

A batch of video cards with so many similar defects is therefore quite rare. It is possible that the user simply did not handle the cards properly, but it is also possible that it is a manufacturing defect. The chance that it happened in transport is not crazy, but what is striking is that all the defective video cards come from Asus, the defective Gigabyte cards from this customer had no cracks in the PCB. This does not mean that the problem lies with Asus, it may be that a system builder did not provide the cards with sufficient support during transport.

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Unfortunately, it is not financially interesting to repair these video cards. It is not completely impossible to fix the 12 to 15 layer PCB, but it takes a lot of time and effort, as NorthridgeFix showed in a video earlier this year. The YouTuber expects that the video cards possibly came from eBay and where the customer wanted to make a profit by having them repaired and then reselling them. Apart from the PCB damage, the video cards seemed to be in good condition. The cards themselves are not completely useless, they can still be used to get parts for other defective cards. Cards with broken PCBs have become more common in recent years as the top models from GPU makers have become increasingly heavier. Last year there was also a design error by Gigabyte that caused cracks in the PCB to occur very often.

Source: Tom’s Hardware

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