On HardForums, there was a report (with several photos) of an EVGA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti that abruptly caught fire and, as you might expect, stopped working. It turns out that the damage is reasonably localized, so Allyn and I compared those photos with ones from an xDevs teardown in hopes to pinpoint the most likely component. We did not have that specific card in the office.

Again, this is just our best guess from images over the course of about a half hour.

Image Credit: shansoft at HardForums

Image Credit: xDevs

Image Credit: xDevs

We marked the center of carnage with a red X on both images, which correspond to opposite sides of the PCB. As you can tell… there’s not much there. On the one side, there is an R005 resistor and what looks like two small capacitors. Capacitors, which store energy like batteries, can explode, but they look to be too small to have caused that damage. On the other side, there are a pair of 1R0 1818 inductors, another component that appears to be a capacitor, and four metal solder pads.

Our current best guess, and it’s just a guess, is that something overloaded the card (such as a shorted power phase elsewhere on the card) and that section just happened to be the part that lit up like a fuse. It wasn’t as cut and dry as we were hoping from the start (such as if we saw a giant capacitor with nothing around it) but it doesn’t look like, as some sites are saying, that the VRAM overheated or that the GPU die was defective.