It has only been a day since a possible culprit has been identified for the mysterious game crashes that owners of some GeForce RTX 3080 cards have been experiencing. Now one major manufacturer has come out with a statement that POSCAPS may indeed be to blame for these cards’ inability to maintain higher clock speeds. EVGA has posted the following on its forum.
Hi all,
Recently there has been some discussion about the EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 series.
During our mass production QC testing, we discovered a full 6 POSCAPs solution cannot pass the real-world applications testing. It took almost a week of R&D effort to find the cause and reduce the POSCAPs to 4 and add 20 MLCC caps prior to shipping production boards, this is why the EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 FTW3 series was delayed at launch. There were no 6 POSCAP production EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 FTW3 boards shipped.
But, due to the time crunch, some of the reviewers were sent a pre-production version with 6 POSCAP’s, we are working with those reviewers directly to replace their boards with production versions. EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 XC3 series with 5 POSCAPs + 10 MLCC solution is matched with the XC3 spec without issues.
Also, note that we have updated the product pictures at EVGA.com to reflect the production components that shipped to gamers and enthusiasts since day 1 of the product launch. Once you receive the card you can compare for yourself, EVGA stands behind its products!
Thanks
EVGA
So there you have it. At least one confirmation that weaker POSCAPS cannot handle the heavier power loads incurred at higher clock speeds if used by themselves. They have also stated that while no cards were shipped to customers with the six-POSCAP solution, some preproduction cards may have been inadvertently sent to reviewers by accident. Something tells us that we could be hearing more about this from other manufacturers soon. From space invaders to POSCAPs, it seems there are trends developing with RTX launches.