EVGA, once the most beloved company in the United States, is not doing well. The company has abandoned the production of video cards and cut back on other areas, such as technical support and software development.
Users Reddit massively complain about the conflict between EVGA motherboards and the latest generation of video cards. Due to poor software and hardware compatibility, computers with them do not boot up. Technical support is silent, so the owners resorted to an ingenious trick: they physically sealed the PCIe contacts of the video card.
According to reports, EVGA boards, in particular the Z690 Classified, have SMBUS pins connected in the PCIe slot (pins 5 and 6), which are not usually used by most manufacturers. The SMBUS port is theoretically used by components to facilitate communication — power and temperature management of the video card, etc. It is possible that NVIDIA RTX 50 graphics cards do not use or improperly process these signals, which effectively stops the system from booting.
«EVGA is a shadow of its former self, and BIOS updates due to hardware compatibility issues are like pulling teeth. They’ve basically left their customers to their own devices with regard to their motherboards»,” complains one owner.
After conflict with NVIDIA in 2022 EVGA withdrew from the graphics card market and significantly reduced its other activities. The direct consequence was poor support at the software level. This probably led to the problem mentioned above. User support was reduced to Reddit forums. Looking through the old threads, one of them found the cause in pins 5 and 6. A piece of 2 mm wide duct tape isolates them and makes them unusable. Some suggest removing the pins themselves. Also, some other EVGA boards, such as the Z690 and Z790, do not have this problem.
Source: Tom’s Hardware
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