Pulled it

Yesterday I was doing research into why my brand new, lightning fast computer was running WoW, a game with low horsepower requirements by today’s standards, poorly.  To get the game to run at all I had to set the graphical settings very low and even then I was still getting some glitching and lock ups.  When I got home I loaded up a couple GPU benchmark/stress testing apps.  The card locked hard on these which now told me this wasn’t a driver/WoW settings issue, something is up with the RTX 2080.

A quick Google search reveals a ton of people having issues with the card that was only released late last year.  The most common issues reported were overheating and lock ups.  In my case the card never ran long/hard enough to overheat, it just locks up.  So I unexcitedly called the number for HP support, fully expecting to be greeted by someone with a strong Indian accent which would make the interaction extremely tedious.  I was pleasantly surprised when Jason, who was located in California answered instead.  During the call I let him know how surprised/happy I was to get support whose native language was English.

So I expected to have a lot of hassle convincing support to send me a new card but it wasn’t tough at all.  As I was going through the troubleshooting steps with him, Jason asked how familiar I was with computers.  I told him I was pretty familiar since I have been working on them since 1992. Once he had that information he was very quick to believe my theory that the card was bad, based on the testing I did.  So he arranged for a new card to be sent out to me which I will swap myself.

So to get by I installed the GTX 1060 card that was in my dead HP.  Although not nearly as powerful as the 2080 it will be 100% fine until I get a replacement.  It’s a bit disconcerting to have this sort of problem out of the box.  I can only hope the new card they send me is absent the issues that have hammered so many of the RTX initial releases.