Nvidia: RTX 3080 capacitor composition is not an indication of quality

Nvidia has provided an initial response to reports of stability issues experienced by RTX 3080 card owners. According to Nvidia, the number of groupings of different capacitors can vary and is not necessarily an indication of quality.

Nvidia reports that it is working closely with partners who create their own graphics card designs. “The correct number of SP cap versus mlcc groupings may vary depending on the design and is not necessarily an indication of quality,” said the manufacturer.

With this, the company responds to reports of problems such as crashes that owners of an RTX 3080 from an Nvidia partner experience. Several sites pointed to the groups of capacitors directly behind the GPU core last weekend as a possible cause. Manufacturers use mlccs for their cards multilayer ceramic chip capacitors, or SP caps, are a type of polymer capacitor, or a combination of the two.

The cards with SP caps show more stability issues, according to reports from last weekend. According to Nvidia, it does not have to be the case that the presence of SP caps offers less quality. According to Videocardz, mlccs are small and cheap and SP caps are bigger. SP caps are said to perform worse at high frequencies, but also less prone to leak and perform better at high temperatures.

Different capacitor layouts with ‘poscaps’ / SP caps (red) and mlccs (green). Images via Igor’s Lab