God Of Gaming wrote:Why are they dying so much? I have a Quadro equivalent of the Ti4600, with the small stock heatsink, and it doesnt seem to run particularly hot under load, so its not because of heat issues, is it?
We all know that processors are different, even on the same die.
Due to the inevitable variations there are different qualities.
Specimens that are good, draw little current (or in other words, leak energy) and switch faster than others.
For this reason we know that there of the same processor type there are more or less numerous variations in (optimum) voltage and clock limit.
However on GPUs there is no such "individual treatment".
But how do the GPU manufacturers deal with the inevitably varying qualities of the production output?
So my suspicion is that good chips that do not run hot (compared to the majority) are being used for passive cards,
and the best ones, those which in addition can serve at high clock, go to the premium cards,
Finally, on the other end of the quality spectrum, the worst chips (slow, developing much heat) go to cheap cards with massive fan coolers.
This is my personal speculation.
So I suspect that possibly this "NOS stock" actually might be some old returns leftover that got rediscovered and sold for a very low price to get rid of it quickly.