First off, I'm in Australia, so all of this was through ASUS' Australian branch.
Anyway, I have no idea what to do. I've been beating my head against the wall with this for weeks now. My RTX 2080 Strix card started freezing and crashing during games and graphically intensive applications like Blender. It would also display weird artefacts all over the screen, lock everything up and from there have a 50/50 shot of just the game/application crashing or it giving me a full BSoD restart. Someone linked me this video here:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIRfPlC15uc
Which is for RTX 2080 Ti's but that's the exact same issue I get. Steve also says it could easily apply to the 2080 as well and it stands to reason they were manufactured in the same factories, using the same silicon, at the same time, side by side.
So I RMA'd the card through the retailer and got it back from ASUS, checked the serial number and... it was the same one. "Ok", I thought, "maybe it was a different issue and they managed to fix it", so I boot it up and it seems fine. For a couple hours. Then the same issues started coming back. Slowly at first, could get no more than 30 seconds before a crash before, now sometimes I'd get an hour. But then it started deteriorating again back to where it was, couldn't run games at all and eventually could even boot the system with the card installed because the screen would be super glitchy and pixelated and would lock up eventually. Once I got the card back and realised it was still having issues, I ran Heaven. Only got it to complete once (it crashed about a minute after completing, the application wasn't even open anymore) and the score was 1817, with an average FPS of 72.1, a min of 8.7 and a max of 139. I don't know a ton about benchmark scores, but I'm almost positive it should've been higher.
So naturally, I emailed ASUS and told them and they tried to tell me it was a software issue. I told them that before I'd even RMA'd it the first time, I'd already tried reinstalling all the drivers, using hotfixed drivers, older drivers that I knew worked before, even tried reformatting my whole drive and reinstalling Windows to get everything installed as cleanly as possible to rule out software issues. None of that helped. After I told them that, they actually admitted that they were able to recreate the issue in the first RMA and I was welcome to send it back again. I asked them if I was getting a replacement this time and they said they couldn't give me one, that I'd have to go back to the retailer. They also wanted to me to pay shipping which seems super wrong.
Anyway, clearly wasn't getting anywhere with them and they were taking days at a time to get back to me, so I got back in contact with the retailer and explained it all to them. They said that they're just a middle man here, they just pass the cards on to the manufacturer and the manufacturer decides everything from there. I'm not sure how that process actually works but that makes sense to me, this would be ASUS' fault for giving them a bad product, not their fault for selling it, so surely the replacements would come from ASUS? It's not like a retailer can just afford to give away cards just because it received a batch of faulty ones from the manufacturer. But maybe I'm wrong, and they are supposed to supply the replacement.
Anyway, since then I've tried to get in touch with other facets of ASUS' customer service department hoping that someone will be able to give me a more reasonable response, tried calling, using their main support email address, their live chat service, and all of them just say they can't do anything, GPUs aren't their department and then just refer me back to the same email address that said they couldn't replace it.
Just feels like I'm either stuck with a $1200 brick, or doomed to infinitely RMA this thing until my warranty runs out or I just go insane. What can I even do about this?
Anyway, I have no idea what to do. I've been beating my head against the wall with this for weeks now. My RTX 2080 Strix card started freezing and crashing during games and graphically intensive applications like Blender. It would also display weird artefacts all over the screen, lock everything up and from there have a 50/50 shot of just the game/application crashing or it giving me a full BSoD restart. Someone linked me this video here:
Which is for RTX 2080 Ti's but that's the exact same issue I get. Steve also says it could easily apply to the 2080 as well and it stands to reason they were manufactured in the same factories, using the same silicon, at the same time, side by side.
So I RMA'd the card through the retailer and got it back from ASUS, checked the serial number and... it was the same one. "Ok", I thought, "maybe it was a different issue and they managed to fix it", so I boot it up and it seems fine. For a couple hours. Then the same issues started coming back. Slowly at first, could get no more than 30 seconds before a crash before, now sometimes I'd get an hour. But then it started deteriorating again back to where it was, couldn't run games at all and eventually could even boot the system with the card installed because the screen would be super glitchy and pixelated and would lock up eventually. Once I got the card back and realised it was still having issues, I ran Heaven. Only got it to complete once (it crashed about a minute after completing, the application wasn't even open anymore) and the score was 1817, with an average FPS of 72.1, a min of 8.7 and a max of 139. I don't know a ton about benchmark scores, but I'm almost positive it should've been higher.
So naturally, I emailed ASUS and told them and they tried to tell me it was a software issue. I told them that before I'd even RMA'd it the first time, I'd already tried reinstalling all the drivers, using hotfixed drivers, older drivers that I knew worked before, even tried reformatting my whole drive and reinstalling Windows to get everything installed as cleanly as possible to rule out software issues. None of that helped. After I told them that, they actually admitted that they were able to recreate the issue in the first RMA and I was welcome to send it back again. I asked them if I was getting a replacement this time and they said they couldn't give me one, that I'd have to go back to the retailer. They also wanted to me to pay shipping which seems super wrong.
Anyway, clearly wasn't getting anywhere with them and they were taking days at a time to get back to me, so I got back in contact with the retailer and explained it all to them. They said that they're just a middle man here, they just pass the cards on to the manufacturer and the manufacturer decides everything from there. I'm not sure how that process actually works but that makes sense to me, this would be ASUS' fault for giving them a bad product, not their fault for selling it, so surely the replacements would come from ASUS? It's not like a retailer can just afford to give away cards just because it received a batch of faulty ones from the manufacturer. But maybe I'm wrong, and they are supposed to supply the replacement.
Anyway, since then I've tried to get in touch with other facets of ASUS' customer service department hoping that someone will be able to give me a more reasonable response, tried calling, using their main support email address, their live chat service, and all of them just say they can't do anything, GPUs aren't their department and then just refer me back to the same email address that said they couldn't replace it.
Just feels like I'm either stuck with a $1200 brick, or doomed to infinitely RMA this thing until my warranty runs out or I just go insane. What can I even do about this?
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram