I don't think that there is necessarily anything wrong with 980 Ti B-stock or RMA quality.  I think there is more a problem with 980 Ti quality in general.  980 Ti video cards all of the sudden started failing at a horrendous rate.  No matter how hard you look, I think it is unlikely that you will find a 980 Ti which isn't on the brink of failing.  It wouldn't surprise me if just sending it in the mail was what pushed it over the brink.
At this rate, thankfully, the remaining stock of 980 Ti video cards will be exhausted, and then you can look forward to EVGA being forced to give you some newer model of equal or greater performance which isn't so likely to be on its death bed.
Keep insisting on free replacements where EVGA covers the shipping cost.  You'll help everyone out by eliminating the supply, then you and all your fellow 980 Ti owners will finally be in the clear.

You haven't seen that they are burning up VRM left and right? One day it just started to happen. We were up to one reported card burning up per week here for a while.

ty_ger07
You haven't seen that they are burning up VRM left and right? One day it just started to happen. We were up to one reported card burning up per week here for a while.

 So for a short period of time there were a lot of reports then suddenly the decline to nothing again? I'm around just as much as anyone and I have not seen any reports of this over the usual noise level. I'd more likely believe aging TIM as an issue. My over clocked reference 980 TI is being used by my Nephew pretty much 24/7 for years. Also, as a technical point, the inductor is not the likely failure. Another component failed overloading the inductor. Which is why replacing the inductor isn't a solution despite it frequently being offered as one. Anecdotal evidence ya know....

bump.

My buddy bought his 980ti back in the summer of 2015, Gigabyte Windforce OC which he sold to me a few months back when I sold my 2080ti and it runs like a champ!

This is a bummer to hear. My 1080 Ti SC 2 bstock has been great.

I have/had quite a few EVGAs from the B stock sales and a single Zotac founders as far as 980tis go.

I compiled the list...
06G-P4-4991-RX - this card was fine put it in my stepson’s Dell was in good cosmetic shape

06G-P4-4995-RX - this was an sc+ looked brand new, black screened after 10 minutes, temps were fine. When RMAed, replaced with 980ti classified 06G-P4-4997-KR which looked new and worked fine.

06G-P4-4997-KR -replacement for above card, part number indicates new, is it? Couldn’t really tell, it looked new. The Classifieds I think had a more robust VRM setup anyway. Regardless as of now this card is functioning well.

06G-P4-1996-RX - this was a liquid cooled, looked great, you can read the ordeal I had with this in one of my other posts. It had weird pinpoint artifacts once it reached operating temps, I RMAed it. They sent it back all banged up after not solving the original issue and the AIO pump no longer appeared to work. They had no more 980tis liquid cooled so they sent a 1070ti which obviously doesn’t count since it’s a different series. If you see my post above it appeared to work fine, initially. After a few weeks it went south, and I didn’t use it all that heavily. The weird things about this though is these hybrid cards run cold. This one rarely got above 43, the 1070ti maybe 44 tops. You’d think the low temp would cause it to last longer and have fewer issues.

06G-P4-4991-RX - it looked kinda rough, the one trim piece on the edge was pulling off. We were gonna SLI this with the other in my stepson’s computer but it looked too lousy. It worked fine. Ended up giving it to a friend to stop gap for the new cards. It still works though.

So we started with 4 cards. 2 were defective. One was replaced and the replacement was fine. The Zotac founders was also fine. None of these appeared to be a result of VRM issues though. If I had to speculate the liquid cooled was a dying GPU and the SC+ was most likely a solder joint.