Even As Graphics Card Prices Skyrocket, Build Quality on the Decline? | TechPowerUp
 
So you finally fork out four-figures for a performance-segment graphics card that had a $350 predecessor a couple of generations ago, and what do you find? Misaligned thermal pads, poorly installed cooling, and other build quality flaws. Reddit and other social media platforms show a noticeable increase in people with fairly premium graphics cards that have manufacturing defects that can lower the product life. One such user, kamaloo92, posted pictures of an ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3080 Ti OC with a missing block of thermal pads over a row of memory chips. GDDR6X chips are capable of heating in the high-90s Celsius, and a poorly cooled block of memory can cause artifacting in the long run. This, from a company that prides itself in its manufacturing standards.

Another horror story comes from obamaprism3, who posted pictures of an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition with a poorly installed memory thermal pad that was so placed so far off, that it overlapped with the cooler's main base, posing severe risk of overheating and performance loss to the GPU. Staying with Founders Edition, a user named antonyjeweet discovered a worker's finger cot stuck under a memory thermal pad of their insanely expensive RTX 3090 Founders Edition card. Recently, we did the story of a PowerColor RX 6700 XT with protective film over thermal pads still in place.
 
I personally think quality control in these factories needs to be improved.
 

Raising prices and cutting corners...not a good recipe

I absolutely love that there is 4 examples out of possibly hundreds of thousands of products, and it isn’t from one company, it is 4 separate entities.

4… out of hundreds of thousands. I’m sure there is probably one or two more out there.

Seems like a majorly overblown story.

Maybe if there was hundreds of cards with no pads or paste, or anything consistently occurring, but seriously, everyone is looking for a story to get that ad revenue up.

I personally discovered thermal pad protective film still present on a motherboard heatsink in 2005 or 2006, so it's not new.

austin86
This is nothing new, not even for EVGA. I seen cards going years back with bad thermal pads installs, mistakes are bound to happen. Most users don't monitor temps close enough to tell if a pad is miss placed and even less would remove the cards heatsink to check. So the 4 in the report could be representing a much higher number of cards. The average user will RMA their card when it dies and never know if the pads were installed right or not. 
 
With all the labor shortages company's have to start sourcing labor were they normally would not do so, so I'm betting we will see more of this sadly. 

These aren't mistakes, this is a failure of quality control across a broader industry. Ultimately, these aren't labor shortages either. These are employers failing to pay competitive wages with tolerable working conditions.
 
The real question is whether they will allow increasing QC issues lead problems that generate a class action for failing to produce a product to spec.

this is not going on good direction..
 
this  is going on a really really  BAD direction...
 
higher prices. lower quality..