A capacitor issue appears to be the cause of crashes on some Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 graphics cards.

Last week, a series of RTX 3080 cards, mostly factory overclocked, were reported to cause crashes on desktops when the GPU exceeds 2.0 GHz. Now graphics card manufacturer EVGA has announced that there is a problem with the type of capacitors used in the RTX 3080.

"During mass production QC testing, we discovered that the full 6 POSCAPs solution failed to pass real-world application testing," the company said in a blog post. This delayed the launch of the EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 FTW3 series. "6 POSCAP's production EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 FTW3 boards never shipped. 5]

"However, due to time pressure, some reviewers were sent pre-production versions of 6 POSCAP."

"We are working directly with those reviewers to replace those boards with the production version.

Replaced with basic English, the card EVGA was referring to uses a different capacitor design than that found on the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition, which is effectively a reference graphics card."

Igor's Lab deduces that this is due to the different set of capacitors used on the back of the printed circuit board under the actual GPU on the RTX 3080 graphics card. [The RTX 3080 uses POSCAPS (conductive polymer tantalum solid capacitors) and MLCCs (multilayer ceramic chip capacitors) to filter the voltage to the GPU. the RTX 3080 card can use all POSCAPS or a mixture of POSCAPS and MLCC capacitors can be mixed.

Our sibling site Tom's Hardware explains that MLCCs are cheaper, smaller, and perform better at high clocks, whereas POSCAPS are larger and more expensive but have better resistance to thermal cracking. However, POSCAPS are not as good as MLCCs when operated at high clocks.

Given this, it seems that EVGA's use of an all-POSCAPS design is causing problems for the RTX 3080 card. Therefore, EVGA has switched to a mixture of POSCAP and MLCC.

However, this may have been an issue with early EVGA cards shipped to reviewers, with reports of crashes to the desktop affecting RTX 3080 cards from other manufacturers and even cards from Nvidia.

Therefore, it remains unclear if the capacitors are the issue behind the crashes that have occurred with other cards. If this is indeed the case, the RTX 3080 cards that people have gotten may have to be returned to the company that manufactured them. If this happens, it could cause a great deal of inconvenience to many PC gamers.

The RTX 3080 sold out quickly when it was released and is still hard to find, but we recommend acting cautiously here.

We have heard nothing from Nvidia about any problems people have encountered. Therefore, it is worth being a little patient until it is more clear whether the RTX 3080 crashes can be fixed with a driver update or whether a more serious fix is needed.