The 30th august (not september) date was mentioned repeatedly in the VRM threads. There's dozens of them. It's in there somewhere many times.
The shipped date info is on the guest RMA page under the support tab on the forum bar at the top of the page. You go to the guest RMA page and put in your serial number of your card and it's supposed to tell you when it left the factory. In my case however it's clearly wrong.
So far i've seen TWO cards with damage. The same two cards are dragged out to show supposedly massive problems with these cards. Mine runs fine but i have an intricate cooling system with fans and air channels all over the place. So everything runs cool.
Yet again the gaming media have run amok with a small problem and turned it into a PR nightmare for EVGA and they don't care. Nor will they face any action for their damage to EVGA's reputation. Without further evidence, at this point TWO cards out of tens/hundreds of thousands have failed. TWO.
EVGA are rightly offering thermal pads for people to allay their worries which is good. I will be applying mine to be on the safe side, as it's an expensive bit of kit to destroy. But as I say mine seems to be running really well.