With the stupid price hike hitting nearly every PC part, you don’t need me to spell out and feel the trouble and cost of getting a brand new GPU, let alone if the newly upgraded system keeps crashing no matter what.
That’s what Reddit user u/ExtraCrunchy ran into – he brought a fresh PNY GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, installed it into his rig, and ran into random freezes. Luckily, he’s well-versed in using HWInfo for troubleshooting, with the software detecting a “PCIe error” that signals the possibility of an insecure GPU installation.
Welp, after pulling out the card for reseating, he witnessed perhaps the most stupid thing of all – a warranty sticker covering the gold contact points.
Posting about his rage in the forum, the main concern of this QC fail is more about the uncomfortable dilemma of “potentially voiding warranty and RMA coverage”, and with all the “strict policies” and iron stance of not honoring any guarantee due to the slightest human “modifications”, ExtraCrunchy’s fear is fully justified.
Later in the day, ExtraCrunchy posted an update saying the sticker on their own card was loose enough to shift with a bit of isopropyl alcohol and distilled water, which stopped the crashing, but the GPU still refused to launch any games, effectively leaving it dead on arrival.
Meanwhile, one reply in the comments from u/geraam echoes the exact pain with his RTX 5080, also from PNY. Fool them once, fool them twice. Perhaps it is a batch issue rather than an isolated case at this point.
