Hello all,
 
I have been in contact with the EVGA Taiwan customer support about my GTX 1080 (08G-P4-6286-KR) variant. EVGA doesn't even offer to sell this product anymore and they keep claiming that there is nothing wrong with this model. After any Nvidia driver past 391.35 will cause the the card to crash upon any GPU load and causes the card to be stuck in the low power state (~150Mhz GPU clock and 405Mhz Mem clock) which continually crashes with any gpu load. Also, even on Nvidia driver 391.35(which is the most stable from my findings), the card stutters when it hits the thermal throttles i.e. 59 degrees Celcius, 67 degrees Celcius, etc. I know this is how the dynamic clocking works and it's normal for the card to dynamically lower the GPU clock by 25Mhz but it still causes the stutters/frame drop. I have RMA'd this GPU 3 times over the course of 2 years and also since now I'm back in Asia, they required the card be shipped to Taiwan for the RMA. I RMA'd once to Taiwan from Malaysia and under their specifications of which courier service to use as well as how it has to be packaged, it costed me $150 USD just to ship.
 
After my most recent RMA, I decided to try every form of troubleshooting to make sure it is indeed the GTX 1080 (08G-P4-6286-KR) variant that has problems.
 
Here is my current build:
Asus Z-170A
Intel Core i5-6600k
EVGA GTX 1080 FTW ACX3.0
Corsair Dominator DDR4 3000
EVGA Supernova 1000 P2
 
What I have done to troubleshoot:
- Disable turbo boost
- Multiple DDU and test every Nvidia driver dating back to the 378.92
- Disable HPET
- Disable and uninstalled Realtek HD audio drivers
- Underclock the card
- Undervolt the card
- Setting Nvidia control panel for max performance
- PSU has proper 3.3V, 5V and 12V rails measure
- reinstalled Windows 10 64-bit with Home Premium or Pro
 
The reason for my first RMA was because I immediately encountered the black screen and full fan spinning defect EVGA GTX 1080 FTW ACX3.0 2 years ago. So dating back to around July of 2018, I have had maybe around 40 emails between EVGA TW and myself about the card. I got my friend to bring his GTX 1080 ti SC (don't know which variant of the SC he had) to try it in my system as on his, it is stable/no stutters and I find out it works perfectly fine on my system. I finally broke and asked to just pay for any card other than the GTX 1080 (08G-P4-6286-KR) variant, and they finally got back to me last week that they had an internal discussion for a special step up program for me. So for $180 USD, I'm paying to get a GTX 1080 Ti SC Black edition (11G-P4-6393-KR). EVGA TW has promised me this time they will pay for the shipping and handling. The gist of this post is to just let other users in this community to see that it took me 2 years of 3 RMAs, 3.5 months of 40 emails and ~$330 USD(after paying a full price of $700 USD two years ago for a faulty product) to finally get me proper working GPU when I should have been promised one in the first place.
 
Thank you for reading.

Hello,

Please keep us updated once you receive the card. 

Hello,
 
I will ask our Taiwan team to look into this further. 

I have messages in question and will be having the RMA department contact you directly to confirm the process with you. Please allow up to 2 business days for a response. 

@EVGATech_JeffP
Exactly as I predicted. Using the previous email's language against me and failing to own up to this whole mess of a customer service.

Basically only one exception to policy is allowed, either you can get the shipping covered as an exception as it has been more than 30 days since we shipped the card or you can accept the upgrade offer which is an exception to the policy of like for like replacements. I'm sorry I can't help anymore than trying to explain the situation better. 

Show me where a "special" step-up program, where the customer has to pay for it, is under your EVGA policies? Also why do you feel it's ok to sell faulty products and not want to fix the mess created under goodwill gesture to a paying customer that has payed so much, that I could have afforded Nvidia Titan XP by now?