Nvidia RTX 4090 Founders Edition borked by winged worm that got trapped inside

We're used to studying approximately troubles affecting the RTX 4090, but within reason to Nvidia, this today's incident ought to hardly ever be blamed on Team Green. It appears the offender was a computer virus; the literal kind. A winged insect had made its way within the pictures card, borking the high priced Lovelace product.

YouTube channel NorthWestRepair defined that they were contacted through a consumer who desired a restore for their "trendy" RTX 4090 Founders Edition that changed into bought at resale without a guarantee.

Testing the cardboard revealed that even though the fans have been blowing and reaching their max speed, no picture appeared on the monitor.

What followed subsequent have been the usual assessments for any apparent troubles. It was then time to open up the card and conduct an in-depth exam of the PCB, looking for brief circuits, cracks, and faults, checking the BIOS chip for activity, and so forth.

Finding no apparent issues, NorthWestRepair moved directly to the GPU itself. Desoldering the AD 102 chip revealed some thing unexpected: the carcass of a winged insect, which seems to have located itself trapped inside the unlucky, and uncommon, function between the GPU and PCB pads whilst the RTX 4090 FE become on the meeting line. The body presumably affected a number of the ball grid array (BGA) contacts.

Having found what changed into wrong, NorthWestRepair proceeded to clean and re-ball the GPU earlier than refitting it. He completed the restore procedure with the aid of testing the now fully running card and strolling some 3Dmark benchmarks.

One might imagine that locating an insect inner a photographs card is a rare incidence, however NorthWestRepair located the same component interior a Zotac GeForce RTX 3080 Ti AMP Extreme Holo he became repairing just 3 months ago. The repairer found "what become left" of the insect after it tried "to urinate on a powered device."

Nvidia can't blame insects of the many-legged kind for every RTX 4090 problem. Last week introduced news that one of the cards had self-immolated after right installation and only 365 days of use for no apparent reason.

H/t: PC Gamer