Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Can a Program BRICK Your PC?”.
So by now, you’ve probably heard about how new world a new video game from amazon is supposedly breaking people’s graphics cards and we’re not just talking about old cards that maybe can’t keep up with the demands of the game. We’Re talking. Ultra high end, rtx, 3090s and reportedly other pricey cards, which would be expensive under normal circumstances, but frying gpus in this economy really and sure running a badly coded game or any game for that matter can cause freezes or crashes. If the software and hardware layers aren’t all communicating with each other properly, but that’s pretty different than permanently wrecking a card, so how could this happen? Let’S start out by talking specifically about new world at the time of writing, the cause hasn’t been completely nailed down, but the issue appears to be with how the graphics card monitors its own hardware. Users have been seeing incredibly high fps spikes into the thousands in the game’s menu screen and making the cards fan controllers think that the card needs to be aggressively cooled.
Apparently, the chip that controls this behavior is faulty and it tries to spin the fans up to over 200 000 rpm, which is around 100 times faster than a normal range yikes. When this happens, the card draws tons of power for those fans which can result in it catastrophically failing and turning into an expensive paperweight. Although the problem was first reported when the game was at its main menu, shorter fan, spikes can also occur during normal gameplay. Due to the bad part on the card, amazon has said that one way to avoid this is to cap the game’s frame rate in the in-game settings and ensure that there are no overrides in your driver.
Settings and amazon has even released a patch that is supposed to limit the menu fps. Specifically, another solution that seems to be working is to set the card’s power limit to around 50 to 60 percent, so it won’t draw so much that it’ll, fail and evga, for its part, is replacing any of its 3090s that have crap themselves while running new world. Now, let’s tackle a more general question, suppose that you have a system that doesn’t have glaring hardware: defects like the one we just discussed. Can you still break it just by playing a game or running a certain program? The short answer is technically yes, but it’s very, very unlikely.
One way it could happen is if a program started messing around in your uefi, your system’s firmware. In other words, you know how you’re told that if you lose power during a firmware update, you could brick your motherboard. This is because your pc needs that firmware to boot up and control critical settings so having it corrupted could be like taking the starter out of your car if your motherboard doesn’t have some kind of backup. Fortunately, it’s very rare that a program would go rooting around in your uefi and modern uefis typically have strong security built in that’s hard for programs to bypass.
But let’s say that you have malware that’s actively trying to harm your pc. There are ways that malware can physically damage your hardware, such as through a row hammer exploit for ram, which accesses a specific row of memory over and over and over again to the point of permanently screwing up your modules. Another way this can happen is through a power virus which pushes your cpu to its limit kind of like a malicious version of prime95, which some manufacturers call a power virus, and this can damage your cpu if it doesn’t limit its power usage correctly. The good news is that modern hardware has fail-safes to prevent against some types of attacks like these and regardless malware like this is quite rare in the wild. So this business with new world was a thankfully rare example of uncommon circumstances coming together to break expensive components. I wouldn’t worry too much about there suddenly being a huge outbreak of these kinds of stories, though maybe think twice about early access titles, if your gear is out of warranty just in case thanks to seasonic for sponsoring today’s video, season’s prime ultra titanium, pc power supplies Feature ultra high efficiency with their 80 plus titanium rating they’re, fully modular feature, hybrid fan, control to control overall fan noise and fluid dynamic bearings, and they offer up to 50 000 hour. Life expectancy along with a 12 year. Warranty check them out at the link below, thanks for watching guys like dislike check out some of our other videos and maybe leave a comment with some video suggestions and don’t forget to subscribe and follow.
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