RTX 2080 Ti Launch Issues Dissected

NVIDIA’s flagship new GPU, the RTX 2080 Ti, has stumbled out of the gate. Multiple reports of issues with this new launch exist on Reddit and Nvidia’s own forums. Different users are claiming to have the following issues: “blue screens, artifacts, card then suddenly stops working, artifacting issues, black flicking lines on occasion”.  And even after RMA, some are claiming the same issue reoccurring with their replacement cards.

While these reports are concerning there are several factors to consider before calling the launch a failure. For one, there is the possibility these are unreliable reports. Additionally, just as the squeaky wheel gets the grease, those with issues are going to be the loudest even if they are a small minority of actual purchasers. Finally all purchasers are still guaranteed a working card through RMA, though it may take some time. However with a price tag up to $1,899.99, and multiple delays before the actual release, consumer worries about receiving a bad card are justified.

Nvidia has responded to these complaints and their comments are reassuring. They claim that “it’s not an increasing number of users” affected and that they are working with users to resolve any issues. Additionally there do not seem to be a huge percentage of returns, retailer Overclockers UK claim a return rate of 3.5% for RTX 2080 Ti  cards, barely above their normal 3.34% return rate for their other two highest selling cards.

As more time has passed, it seems the expensive new Turing architecture RTX 2080 Ti cards did have a small manufacturing issue with some of their early production run. The cards were reported to have bad screw connections on the cooler and cold solder joints, causing some issues. Additionally the current RTX 2080 Ti cards now ship with new memory cards as they replaced the original GDDR6 memory from Micron with new Samsung memory, indicating that the old memory was unreliable.

These small changes seem to have had the intended effect, as we are starting to see less RMA’s with all of our recent batches of RTX 2080 Ti’s. While we certainly had our share of defective cards, Nvidia seem to have stepped up and resolved the issue. Now all of our new cards are running great!

Lease a new RTX 2080 Ti (with Samsung memory) from us today!