Roughly six weeks ago, people started complaining about NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 cards breaking after they played Amazon's latest game, New World, which is currently in beta. Initially, the game defaulted to an unlimited frame rate, which pushed GPUs to their limits. Amazon reacted quickly and set a frame rate limiter, which it distributed in an update.
PCWorld theorises that the unlimited framerate caused New World to jump from 100 FPS to over 800 FPS when switching from in-game to a menu, causing a huge voltage spike. Contrary to earlier speculation, the issue did not stem from a faulty fan controller. EVGA has categorically ruled out the fan controller as the culprit and blames sloppy workmanship, instead.
Apparently, EVGA learned from X-ray images that the defective graphics cards had poor solder joints around their MOSFET circuits, which help a card regulate its voltage. Presumably, the voltage spikes overloaded these, but EVGA has not offered a further explanation on the matter.
However, the company claims that less than 1% of all RTX 3090 cards that it has sold are affected. Fortunately, EVGA is replacing the affected graphics cards for free. It does not seem as though any other EVGA graphics cards suffer from a similar problem, either.