Bad soldering was the root cause of the bricked EVGA GeForce RTX 3090 graphics cards.

It created a storm of criticism. When Amazon Studios released the closed beta for their upcoming New World MMO, players began to claim that the game was damaged RTX 3090 graphics cards.

Amazon Studios has since removed the closed test from its website. Third-party monitoring tools reported that the issue appeared to be disproportionately affecting EVGA cards, and a preliminary study indicated that the issue may have been caused by a defective fan controller, as seen by the poor readings received from third-party monitoring tools. It was established that this behavior was not the root cause of card failures as the fan controller issue was caused by noise on the communication bus, which their software was able to filter out.

EVGA - All of the cards were earlier production run cards manufactured in 2020. Under an X-ray analysis, they appear to have "poor workmanship" on soldering around the card's MOSFET circuits that powered the impacted cards.

Following an investigation, the company has established that the bricked cards were the result of a soldering error that affected a batch of cards. A selection of faulty cards returned to EVGA were subjected to X-ray examination, which revealed that the soldering surrounding the MOSFET circuits had been performed with "poor craftsmanship." The wording is a little weird, as that is an automated process, managed by SMT guns. 

This issue was present on early production runs in 2020 and that it impacts less than 1% of the total number of RTX 3090 cards made by them. In addition, Amazon Game Studios on their end has included a frame limiter in New World to ensure that this issue does not recur in future versions of the game.