Design flaw with Gigabyte Aorus 2080Ti Xtreme

Hey guys,

I will keep this short and sweet, but those who are considering on purchasing the Gigabyte Auros 2080Ti Xtreme, think twice before your purchase.

I originally purchased two of these cards, on the day of installation one went bad whereby the central fan was colliding with one of the outer fans causing a horrendous clicking noise. I believe this was down to a fan or motor imbalance. Due to some questionable engineering on the part of Gigabyte, the tolerance between the fans I would hazard is 1-1.5mm, meaning there is little room for error should something be misaligned. I checked this out by taking out the card and manually spinning the fans, low and behold the fans definitely collide with each other and there is a certain amount of play with the fans vertically. I think Gigabyte should have stuck with fans having their own enclosures, having them running so close was a poor decision.

I went ahead and RMA'ed my GPU and today after much waiting (The courier actually lost my GPU in transit so had to wait to make a claim), I installed the new card and started to play some games. Around two hours in I hear the dreaded clicking sound again, however low and behold it was not the RMA'ed GPU, it was the other original GPU which had been behaving for approximately two weeks until now. This is a concern. Considering both GPU's are from completely different batches (going by the box batch numbers), there could be a general design flaw with the product.

So I of course was somewhat annoyed. I have sent a message to my re seller in order to start the RMA process and to send in my other GPU. I have lost confidence in this particular product, so I decided to send all the GPU's back for a different model altogether as I am a firm believer that if I received new cards of the same model, either day one I would have issues again or in time the issue would develop. Both of which have happened in my case. For reference the batch numbers of the cards I have had issues with are: 5760 & 0240

All in all, this is just a warning as this looks like a general issue with the cards. I will keep people up to date with the RMA process. Anyone else having this issue then please share.

Thanks,
E

I shutter to think that someone nabbed your GPU, bad enough the cards broke

The Aorus 1080Ti's did this too. The paper thin sheet metal they make it out of bends under the weight of the card and/or in shipping (as was my case). I just bent it back and was all good, but this seems a bit ridiculous.

Yeah that was an annoying turn of events, luckily as they arranged pickup, it was fully insured. The only inconvenience was having to wait 5 further days for an "Investigation" prior to sending me a new one.

I did not know that, This is the first time I have owned The GB Auros GPU range, it is also the last unless they fix it im future products.

Every piece of hardware I have had from gigabyte has died. I lost faith in the company a very long time ago, back when I had P35 and P45 boards from them die.

I searched a bit to see what it looked like and it looks like it's called "Aorus".

The design is definitely a big compromise and looks to be aimed at making a quiet cooling solution. It almost looks like even minor GPU sag could cause twisting of the fan frame leading to blade interference and cooling failure.

I suspect many owners of these will be sending their cards back or looking up tutorials on how to disable and remove the middle fan. For a high end GPU it's utter nonsense to have these sort of issues.

Good shout, I tend to spell that one wrong :/

Yeah it looks like the Sag could be an affecting force on the fans. I was actually using the GPU support poles that came with the cards as well, but alas the issue still prevailed. I can certainly see what GB were trying to achieve with this design but I would argue that the gains were minimal (Looking at my typical load temperatures vs other cards I have had) and all they did was increase the risk of failure. I would image overall they are getting a lot of RMA grief over this, one can only hope that with their next model of Aorus GPU that they take a good backward step and have realistic clearance between the fans.

Enterprise do you think Gigabyte's design intention was trying to interleave the fans so they would get better fan coverage over the heatsink?

That would be part of it, but they were also going for an antiturbulence design by having the central fan spin the other way. While that is fine, the issue was A. Tolerances used in the design between each fan & B. Build quality, without taking a part my GPU it was hard to say why the fan was tilting but I would hazard a guess at a bearing issue, but there is definitely something going bad in that area of the card.

Looks like my RMA on both my cards however has gone through ok, fingers crossed. Time for a new model of GPU altogether, going to have to avoid the GB range of GPU's if they keep on using this fan design. I bet they are getting an awful lot of RMA issues from this.

Guess when I upgrade will stick with EVGA, have never had issues with their fans. There was an issue with thermals with my GTX 1070, yet they notified me before I was aware of it. Didn't replace the pads, the BIOS update alone lowered the temps for my usage. Maybe if I were a hardcore gamer, would had swapped the pads. This is why I prefer registering my hardware when possible, honest OEM's will inform customers of widespread issues.

While I forgot the exact model (one of the 79xx GHz editions), once purchased a Gigabyte GPU used from a eBay seller with high ratings (only negatives were shipping) & there was fan rattle within 3 days. The seller (or his supplier) must had tried to fix the fan. He insisted that he didn't do anything & had never ran the card, although to his credit, sent me a prepaid label to return for refund. Had my refund on the same day he received the return.

Purchased my first EVGA GPU afterwards & except for a MSI, have never looked back. Every Gigabyte product I've had ended as junk, beginning with their AM3 MB's (the type with NVIDIA chipset).

Cat