The issue that the gamer, who goes by the handle antonyjeweet, posted a picture of his “overheating” issue with his RTX 3090 FE card on Reddit, after he had removed the card’s cooler shroud. The culprit of the offense? A finger glove, typically used by factory workers to prevent them from leaving fingerprints on the PCB, during the assembly proves. Specifically, the image shows the latex material sandwiched between the heatsink and two memory modules, that antonyjeweet says caused the card’s temperature to shoot up as high as 110°C. Naturally, after removing the offending matter and applying proper thermal pads on top of the modules, they say that overall load temperatures peaked at 86°C at most.
As much as we would like for a moral to this story to exist, there really isn’t one. As Videocardz puts it: accidents happen, and it is possible that the assembly worker who put this particular RTX 3090 FE may have been running on fumes and wasn’t giving their best that day. Ultimately, antonyjeweet managed to rectify the issue and at the very least, the mistake was not entirely mission critical. (Source: Reddit, Videocardz)