There is chatter on the web that EVGA FTW 1080 and 1070 graphics card are overheating resulting into a black screen. Initially people figured this to be the memory issue exposed last week. The company made a statement and issues a fix.
However reports from end users and some testing at Toms Hardware indicate overheating. Some users even reported the card dying completely. From the looks of it the issue has been uncovered due to the absence of any thermal pads over the VRM area of the FTW family of graphics cards. Some reports show temperatures running 107 ºC on components on the PCB.
In a forum post at EVGA the company issued the following message/statement:
“The test used in the referenced review from Toms Hardware (Germany) is running under Furmark, an extreme usage case, as most overclockers know. We believe this is a good approach to have some idea about the graphics card limit, and the thermal performance under the worst case scenario. EVGA has performed a similar qualification test during the design process, at a higher ambient temperature (30C in chamber) with a thermal coupler probe directly contacting the key components and after the Toms Hardware (Germany) review, we have retested this again. The results in both tests show the temperature of PWM and memory is within the spec tolerance under the same stress test, and is working as originally designed with no issues.
With this being said, EVGA understands that lower temperatures are preferred by reviewers and customers.
During our recent testing, we have applied additional thermal pads between the backplate and the PCB and between the baseplate and the heatsink fins, with the results shown below. We will offer these optional thermal pads free of charge to EVGA owners who want to have a lower temperature. These thermal pads will be ready soon; and customers can request them on Monday, October 24th, 2016. Also, we will work with Toms Hardware to do a retest.”
We agree that Furmark should not be used to stress a card (way too viral on the board and not emulating game load). End users can receive thermal pads provided to anyone with a GTX 1080 or GTX 1070 with an ACX cooler and a backplate.
While we never reviewed the FTW editions, we did notice and made remarks on high load temperatures in the VRM area in our 1070 SC review. So we think that other models like the SuperClocked editions are effected as well. Our above thermal image was not measured with Furmark but with a 3DMark FireStrike loop.
