- Corsair has said that only one of its prebuilt PCs has been affected by Nvidia’s hardware-level fault
- That appears to back up Nvidia’s assertion that the problem, which slows down PC gaming performance, is indeed ‘rare’
- Corsair also underlined that it’s thoroughly checking graphics cards to ensure they meet the official hardware spec going forward
Corsair has shed some further light on RTX 5000 GPUs, as used in its pre-built PCs, and how widespread the reported problems are with Nvidia’s new graphics cards falling short of their official hardware spec.
In case you missed it, there’s recently been some controversy over a ‘rare’ chip-level fault in some Blackwell graphics cards, whereby some rendering pipelines for 3D graphics are missing, slowing down performance in some PC games.
While this is a serious issue – and definitely something that shouldn’t have happened – Corsair has assured us that the problem is as rare as Nvidia indicated (perhaps even rarer).
If you recall, Nvidia said that this issue could hit up to 0.5% of the potentially affected GPUs (RTX 5090 and 5080 boards, and Team Green later admitted that this fault can also be found with RTX 5070 Ti models, but not vanilla 5070 cards). However, according to Corsair, only one customer has run into trouble with a Blackwell GPU that’s short on its rendering pipeline (ROP) count.
Corsair informs us: “Initially, our testing procedures did not flag this specific ROP discrepancy during our production process. However, upon learning of this issue, we immediately implemented a thorough review of the detailed production reports for each system shipped to date. Matching the expected breadth of this issue, we have identified only one customer with an affected GPU and are actively working with them to provide a replacement.”
Corsair further adds that it has now implemented proactive measures regarding this potential problem with Nvidia’s graphics cards, and the company now has a “multi-stage testing protocol during system production to specifically validate the correct ROP count on all RTX 50-series GPUs.”
Corsair also says it’ll test all GPUs going forward to ensure they meet their official specs, observing that: “Every graphics card, including those in the RTX 50 series, undergoes rigorous testing to confirm it meets the manufacturer’s specifications, including the correct ROP count.”
Analysis: Rarity and the blame game
On the face of it, what Corsair is saying here – that there’s just one case the firm has encountered – suggests the problem isn’t affecting many Blackwell GPUs at all. However, obviously this is a very limited sample, and we must be cautious about reading too much into the finding.
Or it could be the case that Corsair didn’t get all that many RTX 5000 GPUs through from Nvidia – theoretically a supply of a couple of hundred would see one faulty board. But as I said, there’s not much point trying to make too much out of this, save for that it seemingly backs up what Nvidia has claimed: that this is a ‘rare’ issue.
To address another point that’s come up here, on some online forums, I’ve seen something of a fuss about PC builders not testing these Nvidia GPUs and picking up on the ROP count being deficient, but I don’t think that’s entirely fair. By which I mean it’s reasonable to assume that a video card provided by Nvidia, or indeed AMD or Intel, lives up to the hardware spec. Should you really need to check that all cores, or rendering pipelines, or other hardware, are present? I’d argue not, though at the same time, given this incident, it’s now perhaps prudent to do so – exactly as Corsair has.
Really, though, a GPU, or CPU, or any PC component, should not ship from the production lines with some hardware-level fault present that impairs the experience for the end user (albeit not massively in some cases, but still – these Blackwell GPUs all cost a lot of money).
This is an issue that the chip maker – Nvidia – should’ve picked up on during QA testing, or indeed the board maker (Nvidia’s partners who take said chips, and make their graphics cards with them). A GPU with a glitch like this shouldn’t be reaching a PC builder (or consumers directly) in the first place.
At any rate, if you have purchased a PC from Corsair, the company notes it offers “lifetime tech support” and you are obviously free to check any Nvidia Blackwell graphics card to see if it has ROPs missing.
You can do that with CPU-Z Validator now – as we explained in a recent article, it will actively warn you in its latest version, which is useful – or as Corsair suggests you can use GPU-Z. The latter process is simple: just download and install GPU-Z, run the app, and go to the ‘Graphics Card’ tab where you can see the ROP count (it’s the seventh line down on the left-hand side). If it has 8 fewer ROPs than the official spec, the GPU in question has this hardware fault, sadly.
Quite why the Nvidia App doesn’t warn you in the same proactive way CPU-Z does, I’m not sure, as this would seem like an obvious move for Team Green to have made by now (given that this problem has been known about for the best part of two weeks at this point).
Via Tom’s Hardware
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