NorthridgeFix, a five-star electronics repair shop that also happens to host a popular YouTube channel, has posted a new video about how it’s received not one, not two, but 19 GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards from a single customer recently, many of which apparently feature damage in the form of cracked PCBs.
Here’s the video from NorthridgeFix, which goes on for nearly 20 minutes and raises the question as to whether there might be a design defect plaguing some of the flagship Ada gaming cards that can be found on today’s market, all of which typically cost well over $1K:
NorthridgeFix has also speculated that these damages could just be a case of user error, however, noting that brackets or GPU stands may have been missing, or, maybe, they were simply treated badly during shipping.
“…a lot of users, they install the video card like this on their motherboard without any support,” NorthridgeFix said at one point in the video. “What ends up happening is the video card sags and it causes the board to break.”
“…or maybe somebody bought a custom-built PC online and the person who sold [it], they pre-installed the video card, and they shipped it with UPS or FedEx,” he added. “You know how UPS and FedEx are like, they play soccer with your packages and the box suffered a lot of impact and the video card cracked.”
Custom GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards from ASUS and GIGABYTE are featured in the video, although the cracked PCBs appear to be relegated to the former’s models.
“I do not know where the customer got all those video cards from, maybe he bought them off eBay, and thought, let me send them over to NorthridgeFix, and I’ll get rich, but things do not work out that,” said NorthridgeFix.