- Corsair has said that only one of its prebuid PC has been affected by the Nvidia hardware failure
- That seems to support Nvidia’s statement that the problem, which slows the performance of PC games, is in fact ‘rare’
- Corsair also stressed that graphics cards are thoroughly reviewing to ensure that they meet official hardware specifications in the future
Corsair has thrown more light on the RTX 5000 GPUs, as used in its pre-constructed PCs, and how extended the problems informed with the new NVIDIA graphics cards that do not reach their official hardware specifications are extended.
In the event that it has been lost, there has recently been some controversy about a failure at the ‘weird’ chip level in some Blackwell graphics cards, so some 3D graphic representation pipes are missing, slowing down the performance in some PC games.
While this is a serious problem, and definitely something that should not have happened, Corsair has assured us that the problem is as rare as Nvidia (perhaps even rarely) indicated.
If you remember, Nvidia said that this problem could reach up to 0.5% of the potentially affected GPUs (RTX 5090 and 5080 boards, and Team Green then admitted that this fault can also be found with RTX 5070 TI models, but not the letters of Vanilla 5070). However, according to Corsair, only one customer has gotten into trouble with a Blackwell GPU that is missing its pipe counting (Rop).
Corsair informs us: “Initially, our test procedures did not mark this specific ROP discrepancy during our production process. However, upon learning of this problem, we immediately implement an exhaustive review of the detailed production reports for each system sent to date. By matching the expected amplitude of this problem, we have identified only a client with an affected GPU and we are actively working with them to provide a replacement. “
Corsair also adds that it has now implemented proactive measures regarding this potential problem with NVIDIA graphics cards, and the company now has a “test protocol in several stages during the production of the system to specifically validate the correct rop count in all RTX 50 series GPUs”.
Corsair also says that he will test all GPUs in the future to ensure that they meet their official specifications, observing that: “Each graphics card, including those of the RTX 50 series, suffers rigorous evidence to confirm that it meets the manufacturer’s specifications, including the correct rop count.”
Analysis: Rarity and the guilt game
At first glance, what Corsair says here, that there is only one case that the company has found, suggests that the problem does not affect many Blackwell GPU at all. However, obviously this is a very limited sample, and we must be cautious when reading too much in the finding.
Or it could be the case that Corsair did not obtain so many NVIDIA RTX 5000 GPU, in theory, a couple of hundreds would see a defective board. But as I said, it does not make much sense to try to get too much out of this, unless it apparently supports what Nvidia has affirmed: that this is a “weird” problem.
To address another point that has come here, in some online forums, I have seen some uproar about PC builders do not try these NVIDIA GPUs and capture that Rop’s count is poor, but I don’t think it’s completely fair. With which I mean that it is reasonable to assume that a video card provided by NVIDIA, or in fact AMD or Intel, is up to the hardware specifications. Should you really verify that all nuclei, or represent pipes or other hardware are present? I would argue that no, although at the same time, given this incident, it is perhaps prudent now to do it, exactly as Corsair has done.
However, really, a GPU, or CPU, or any PC component, should not be sent from the production lines with some failure at the present hardware level that harms the experience for the end user (although in some cases not massively, but still, these GPU Blackwell cost a lot of money).
This is a problem that the chips manufacturer, NVIDIA, should have captured during the quality control tests, or in fact the manufacturer of the Board (the NVIDIA partners who take these chips and make their graphics cards with them). A GPU with a failure like this should not reach a PC builder (or consumers directly) first.
In any case, if you have bought a PC in Corsair, the company points out that it offers “life technical support” and can obviously verify any Nvidia Blackwell graphics card to see if Rops are missing.
You can do it with the CPU-Z validator now, as we explain in a recent article, it will actively warn you in your latest version, which is useful, or as Corsair suggests that you can use GPU-Z. The last process is simple: simply download and install GPU-Z, run the application and go to the ‘Graphics Card’ tab where you can see the ROP count (it is the seventh line down on the left side). If you have 8 rop less than the official specification, the GPU in question has this hardware failure, unfortunately.
Why the Nvidia application does not warn you in the same proactive CPU-Z manner, I am not sure, since this seems an obvious movement for Team Green to have done it now (since this problem has been known for most than two weeks at this time).
Through Tom hardware
