There have been scattered reports of crashes associated with factory overclocked Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 graphics cards. Our sister site Tom's Hardware has identified a statement from EVGA that seems to confirm that a specific type of capacitor may be a contributing factor in these crashes. An earlier report by the website Igor's Lab cited capacitors as the cause of crashes, instability, and black screens.

According to EVGA's statement, engineers were performing quality control on the new cards and discovered that a specific six-capacitor configuration "failed to pass real-world application testing."

Some of the capacitors, called POSCAPS, were replaced with a larger number of alternative MLCC capacitors The problem was resolved by replacing the capacitors with EVGA stated, "This is the reason for the delay in the launch of the EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 FTW3 series."

Rumors of problems with some RTX 3080 cards began circulating earlier this week and are now being reported in increasing numbers on forums and Reddit. Most of these problems have been attributed to overclocked cards, as manually lowering the clock seemed to solve the problem. Most of these cards use an all-POSCAP structure, and EVGA's report seems to indicate that the problem was widespread when they used an all-POSCAP structure in their designs. [However, Tom's Hardware has stated that this may not be the cause of the problem: "Nvidia's Ampere cards have higher power requirements than previous generations of cards, and the drivers are still in the early stages of widespread use." You can read more about this issue and how the two are related at Tom's Hardware.