Nvidia’s Failing Flagship

Last month, we saw an alarming number of reports of Nvidia’s RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition cards failing. Nvidia has admitted that the “limited test escapes from early boards caused the issues.” A test escape denotes a defect that has evaded all testing, a generous term to use—the early cards detonated soon after arrival, so clearly weren’t thoroughly soak tested. There are no firm figures, but anecdotal evidence points to a failure rate of about half of the first batch. The standard RTX 2080 Ti has fared much better at about 2 percent. Still no word on what is failing, and why. Suspicion still centers on the memory, although a problem with the GPU itself hasn’t been ruled out.