Purchased a XLR8 PNY 4080 from Microcenter today. As I was peeling the protective stickers off I noticed this, a bunch of crooked soldering and possibly missing components. I was hesitant to install but did anyway. It works but I haven’t stress tested. Should I pass on this GPU or am I overthinking it? I’d sincerely appreciate anyone’s thoughts on the matter.
26 Comments
Jesus… looks like it melted… lol but it looks fine. A little melting didn’t hurt anyone.
https://preview.redd.it/13nm42wnlhsb1.jpeg?width=750&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9772254055e9240447bb6df0eb9755e257b08e12
Yikes. Those things touching can’t be good. But if it works it works.
It looks like that’s how PNY does it. https://www.techpowerup.com/review/pny-geforce-rtx-4080-verto-epic-x-rgb-oc/3.html
Looks like it was soldered by someone with a severe hangover but if it works it’s fine. A problem in this situation would cause a short and fry something instantly so you’re all good. Consider it a “Friday night special”.
Not the clearest image. SMT either went terribly wrong or some other hack job done by an individual. I can’t tell if it’s actually missing components, but it certainly looks like it was left on a hot plate for too long
Might still be 100% functional though
…just PNY things.
If you have any issues I’m sure Microcenter will make you right if there is an issue.
Those caps look like they’re all sharing the same solder joints on the same end, and it wouldn’t matter much if they were touching in this case. The negative and positive ends are still separate.
It’s normal. They do this from 3000 series.
Maybe saving 0.00001 cent when manufacturing by soldering like this.
I would be returning that bad boy
the question is why these machine soldering doesnt get straight even though there is still space there? why
This is normal for PNY…I can’t say it’s good, but it is factory.
That’s normal, smd can float slightly when being soldered. It’ll be fine.
Are PNY cards bad?
I know they are cheaper, but never had one.
Those are decoupling capacitors. They are basically filters for high-frequency electrical noise. As long as the two sides are not shorted, they will basically work as corrected. That is some crappy-looking workmanship, but probably not going to be an issue. There are a few spots where they are not installed. That might make the card a little less resilient to noise, but that probably just means an occasional pixel doesn’t turn out quiet right – likely to be transient, so you probably won’t even notice.
I have a PNY 4080 but never noticed this. It works perfectly though, I will check tonight.
This intrigued me. My 4080 be like that.
https://preview.redd.it/x23skvev0isb1.jpeg?width=4032&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6aafccb4a8a5b4ee8942c90e646210b8398aa624
After reading this is normal for pny cards, I’m too afraid to look at my asus card. I understand it works functionally, but aesthetically my brain is losing its shit.
Wait, PNY makes Nvidia cards?! Since when? I thought they were AMD exclusive.
Umm no
My smt training is screaming at me to have that done just a tad bit better 😅
My inspection criteria is much more drastic for what I work on however. If she works she works 🤷♂️
That looks suspicious…
At first I thought “this is a bomb waiting to happen”, but after re-examining once I looked at the comments, the soldering looks like the shared nets are probably all going to a plane.
As someone who does amateur PCB repair it does look intentional (albeit unusual). Just a guess but I think those caps might have that giant common solder pad to reduce the [tombstone defect](https://youtu.be/RgxH-kvm8rQ?si=j2zgK2qTvsT8xNaL) during manufacturing.
It is also possible that those pads were meant for larger caps but during development PNY decided to go with multiple smaller ones. Soldering them this way meant they didn’t have to redesign the board. Interestingly the early 3090s had issues with the [little cap vs big cap](https://www.techspot.com/news/86900-capacitor-issues-causing-rtx-30803090-crashes.html) problem. nVidia told manufacturers that either would work but certain designs had stability issues on “factory overlocked” models.
I cant imagine how profitable it would be for someone to buy the equipment necessary to solder these tiny caps and/or resistors, and then sell them? They’d have to have figured out a configuration that works (destroying cards in the process), and then making literal pennies on the sale of the caps/resistors, and the cards.
It’s normal and you’ll probably never experience any problems.
You are more likely to upgrade than to ever notice anything funky.