So, yesterday my videocard just died, completely out of nowhere after around 10 months of daily usage.
The weird thing to me was, there was no sign whatsoever that it might be imminent. No overheating, no artifacts, no reduced performance, nothing.
PC just shut off as if power had been cut, after moments of confusion the smell of burnt/charred plastic filled the air and hasn't really left my nose yet.
I don't know how hot my video card had gotten, but it was too hot to actually touch to remove it from my system. After cooling down I inspected it and sure enough the PCB on the back looked like this
Now I'm sitting here with a somewhat faulty GTX 560ti (one non-working fan, constant driver crashes under load), waiting for the support to answer me so I can get a RMA underway.
 
I'm not really experienced in the ways graphics cards can die and this was completely new to me.
Might there be something else that could be wrong with my system to cause such a death? Or should I be fine in that regard considering currently everthing else seem to function properly.

EVGA will take good care of you so don't worry. Unfortunately things like this can happen but they are very rare.

 
Moving to the Warranty section.

sahafiec
any update on the topic?

My system is running without any unexpected problems, other than that the RMA has been approved and a replacement should be delivered today.
 
EDIT: The replacement just arrived, it's a GTX 970 SSC ACX 2.0
The only "downgrade" compared to my old card would be the memory bandwidth.
Whether or not that is of any real concern to I do not know, but considering it's mostly used for games I think that shouldn't be problematic.
 
Quick question:
Now that I have this replacement card, which seems to be completely new (still sealed in), how long of a warranty time will I have (EMEA-Warranty)? 3 years from today as with a bought product?