I opened a ticket but I wanted to know what the community thinks about this and if this is normal. 
 
Hi, I am new to EVGA. I recently had a EVGA 980 GTX SC break on me, so I sent it in for a RMA. EVGA sent me an upgraded GTX 980 FTW (thanks!) however the left fan doesn't start up and the wires on the left fan are clearly not taped or anything, no idea how it passed QA but anyway...
 
I opened another RMA. Customer support was great and the Advanced RMA came today and shipping was great too. So I open the Advanced RMA'd GPU that was RMA'd due to the faulty RMA sent it because the initial card needed to be RMA'd and am excited to start gaming so I open GPU-Z to check if all is well...
 
  
 
Well it turns out this GTX 980 FTW is using a stock GTX 980 BIOS, which I matched up with Techpowerup's database. Stock clocks, which if I wanted stock or a poorly binned card I would not have paid for an overclocked version, right? :) 
 
What kills me inside is that I requested an additional in-house stress test for stablity/problems so I didn't have to RMA a 3rd time, God forbid, and the customer rep said they would test it. If this in fact is the case then they did test it for stability and this FTW GPU is stable now, however: 
 
1. Either someone honestly did not realize a stock reference GTX 980 BIOS was installed for a FTW model
 
or
 
2. Someone deliberately installed a stock BIOS because the FTW was not stable at overclocked speeds. 
 
What is going on with this? Am I really that hated by EVGA? What did I do? I love you guys. 
 
I played around with overclocking and benchmarking in EVGA Precision X hoping that perhaps I was at least given a good "chip" so it could reach FTW levels, so I could overclock to FTW levels and beyond. Well, running Heaven Unigine 4.0 @ 1350 Core Clock and 1.21v (GPU-Z log) it crashes my display and I have to hard reset. Reference GTX 980's have more headroom than this usually at least 1400, and this is a FTW version, which cost considerably more!
 
I'm so confused and drained, I love EVGA but apparently someone wants to psychologically torture me over there, heh...
 
Just wanted to share. So jealous of anyone with a GTX 980 FTW that actually works and in additional even has room to overclock.  
 
 

Sajin
You could flash the original vbios back onto the card using nvflash. Gotta love the silicon lottery. Only way to get a better overclocker would be the rma again and hope you get a better overclocker or buy a different card and hope it overclocks better.

If support tells me to do so, I will. If it runs fine, I'll be happy. I'm just afraid that it won't be stable at FTW speeds, or the flash will go wrong. I'm currently overclocking and it seems that even a +20mv boost is making the card flicker. I should have started lower going up. Too scared to touch voltage. 

genetiXz

Sajin
You could flash the original vbios back onto the card using nvflash. Gotta love the silicon lottery. Only way to get a better overclocker would be the rma again and hope you get a better overclocker or buy a different card and hope it overclocks better.

Also, isnt the FTW GTX 980 voltage locked at 1.20ish? If so the bios definitely will not handle FTW clock speeds.

This faux FTW cannot even finish running heaven @1260 core without crashing my computer at 1.21v. I genuinely laughed when that happened.

EDIT: Just realized if it is a FTW it would probably hardware restrict going over 1.2, which might explain the hard reboots that have been happening during benchmarks. Hot and cold reboots are usually only for when the OC is very high, otherwise it is a CTD or artifacting. Maybe it does just need a bios flash.

Does GTX FTW 2.0 ACX have dual bios?

1.212v.
 
Yes, the FTW does come with dual vbios support.

Yes, time to send it in. Make sure you let evga know about the card coming with the wrong vbios installed.

Hi genetiXz, 
 
I spoke with your earlier on the phone to discuss the issue and I don't think anyone is surprised that we needed to setup another RMA.
 
We'll see what our RMA department has to say about this last unit, but at this point moving forward I've got the current issue marked for special case so hopefully we'll have this all straightened out soon. You should have the details in the email I sent so let us know if you have any further questions