While examining two Nvidia graphics cards for overheating issues, a technician noticed a hole in their vapor chamber. The phenomenon would mainly affect models of a certain age.
Generally, when you have a problem with your graphics carde, the cause is to be found on the software side. Drivers that are too old or recent but were not installed correctly, a poorly configured fan management program, etc. More rarely, however, the problem can be hardware. And in these cases, it is often serious, like these RTX 4000s which catch fire due to a bad connection.
A technician was given an Nvidia RTX 3080 Founder Edition graphics card, the first releases, for overheating problems. More precisely, the temperature sometimes exceeded the 100° Celsius on certain points of the component. When he took it apart, he noticed something strange, a kind of orange stain on the steam chamber. This is a copper plate used to distribute heat over a surface wide via a system of cooling liquid. The task was actually a hole.
The vapor chamber of Nvidia’s RTX 3080 and A6000 graphics cards can become punctured with age
Having broken through, the steam chamber no longer fulfills its role, necessarily. Heat circulation and dissipation no longer follow the intended path, resulting in the observed localized overheating. Noticing the same problem on a Nvidia A6000 graphics cardthe technician decides to open his own heatsink. Inside, a blue substance and torn pieces of copper. The substance is actually oxidized copper resulting from humidity in the chamber.
It seems that only thewear and tear over time is the cause of the problem. Fortunately, these cases are extremely rare. Otherwise, we could have read many more testimonies of the same kind. The technician also specifies that the graphics cards examined have had experience: their owners have removed the heat sink several times and applied Thermal paste. If overheating problems can appear as the component ages, the appearance of a hole like here is far from happening frequently, and that’s so much the better.
Source: Wccf Tech