Back in July, reports began circulating that the beta of Amazon's MMO New World was bricking pricey EVGA-manufactured RTX 3090 graphics cards. A subsequent statement from Amazon insisted the beta was "safe to play", and that's now been corroborated by EVGA, after its investigation into the issue revealed hardware failures were the result of dodgy soldering.
When reports of card failures began to surface, some users speculated the problem was due to power spikes and overheating caused by uncapped framerates in the New World beta's menus. While Amazon set about capping the framerate as a precautionary measure, EVGA began replacing affected cards and investigating returns to find out exactly what was going on.
Sharing its findings with PC World, EVGA has now revealed that while it wasn't able to replicate the issue using a copy of the New World beta, under X-ray analysis the less-than-two-dozen impacted RTX 3090s it received - all originating from an early 2020 production run - displayed "poor workmanship" on the soldering around the MOSFET circuits that powered the cards.