EVGA GTX 1080 Caught on Video Catching Fire

EVGA released its GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 FTW graphics cards late last month, but within days customers were reporting that its VRMs were overheating and, in some cases, even igniting into flames.

While there have been plenty of anecdotal reports of EVGA’s GTX 1080 and 1070 graphics cards catching fire, and a fair amount of photos of the subsequent damage, this is the first time we’ve had a glimpse of such an event caught on camera. And it is a glimpse, visible in the top-right corner (as circled in the image above) on the 20-second mark:

EVGA has issued a physical fix for the issue – extra thermal pads, available for free, that can be attached to the card to help dissipate excess heat – and is offering free replacements for damaged cards. The company issued the following statement recently:

“The test used in the referenced review from Toms Hardware (Germany) is running under Furmark, an extreme usage case, as most overclockers know. We believe this is a good approach to have some idea about the graphics card limit, and the thermal performance under the worst case scenario. EVGA has performed a similar qualification test during the design process, at a higher ambient temperature (30C in chamber) with a thermal coupler probe directly contacting the key components and after the Toms Hardware (Germany) review, we have retested this again. The results in both tests show the temperature of PWM and memory is within the spec tolerance under the same stress test, and is working as originally designed with no issues.

During our recent testing, we have applied additional thermal pads between the backplate and the PCB and between the baseplate and the heatsink fins, with the results shown below. We will offer these optional thermal pads free of charge to EVGA owners who want to have a lower temperature. These thermal pads will be ready soon; and customers can request them starting Monday, October 24th, 2016. Also, we will work with Toms Hardware to do a retest.”

Some eagle eyed users have pointed out the lack of PCI-E power connectors. The creator of the video had this to say:

“it wasn’t until I unplugged all the other peripherals and power to each that my computer finally powered on then the card fried with no power connected. Now whether the card has power or not while still being connected to the pci slot, that should not have caused the card to spark and fry. I Googled plenty online articles to make sure that was not the case but some says it will and the majority says it should have fried.”