EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 FTW caught fire twice. || Is it worth getting fixed // is it braindead?

AuxiliusM · March 7, 2021

What happened:

So yea after four years my 1080 kicked the bucket, and filled my room with magic blue smoke. That's quite inopportune at the current time and comes a little early for my taste.

It went out in a blaze of glory literally spewing flames out of the side of my case twice (it didn't burn long, just pow-and-gone), now all it does is a electrical arcing sound when plugged in. Somehow the rest of the system is totally fine.

From what i can see a part of the VRM blew up between the PCB and backplate.

My question:

I have a shop that can fix the VRM and they will quote me 100-150€ for it, but if that does not fix it, it's still a fancy paperweight. My hope is that someone who knows a thing about graphic cards, can tell me how likely it is, that this thing is braindead (for example core is rip or something) so i can evaluate if it's worth a shot trying to fix it.

Thx in advance. -Aux

c00face · March 8, 2021

Man, just looking at your card I can tell you had poor circulation from all the nasty junk on your card, around your card, and even on your carpet. 4-years and a 1080 caught on fire? I'll be pretty upset as these type of cards are made to last. Even my RX 570 is still functioning after 4 years. Is it worth repairing? It's worth a shot I guess.

Archer42 · March 8, 2021

57 minutes ago, c00face said:

I'll be pretty upset as these type of cards are made to last.

Are they? In my experience high-end cards rarely last long. 4-5 years is good already. Probably has something to do with power density and physical damage which rapid uneven heating/cooling causes to GPU. Not the reason in this case though...

2 hours ago, AuxiliusM said:

I have a shop that can fix the VRM and they will quote me 100-150€ for it

Problem with fixing damage like this is it cannot really be fixed. There are probably a bunch of shorts in there, will probably have to drill a hole there removing burned parts and simply remove one "phase" which is destroyed. Card can work like this, but it will increase load on other components making second failure more probable. That is if GPU did not die, because replacing GPU will not make any sense. A competent repair shop will be able to diagnose it though... blindly trying to fix VRM does not seems like very good idea.

For Science! · March 8, 2021

I thought this was a wide-spread problem specifically with the EVGA 1080 FTWs. I wouldn't count on it being fixable to a meaningful degree.

https://www.eteknix.com/another-evga-gtx-1080-ftw-sets-fire/

AuxiliusM · March 8, 2021

11 hours ago, For Science! said:

I thought this was a wide-spread problem specifically with the EVGA 1080 FTWs. I wouldn't count on it being fixable to a meaningful degree.

https://www.eteknix.com/another-evga-gtx-1080-ftw-sets-fire/

Hm with a bit of googling this seems to be true, there even was an thermal pad mod directly from EVGA.

That's a little late here tho. Considering this i'm surprised it held up so long, even with 18 ish hours of varied projects and gaming per day.

For Science! · March 8, 2021

52 minutes ago, AuxiliusM said:

Hm with a bit of googling this seems to be true, there even was an thermal pad mod directly from EVGA.

That's a little late here tho. Considering this i'm surprised it held up so long, even with 18 ish hours of varied projects and gaming per day.

It might even be worth contacting EVGA even if its out of warranty since this was really their bad. Maybe you can guilt trip them into sending you a replacement of equivalent value.