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As members have said the 980ti G1 was probably returned for coil whine,
Yes. I owned a b***h of a card (GTX460). It locked up under load, but only in my PC. After hours of component/OS swapping it turned out it was the card (not my PC) and was swapped by Gigagbyte. The replacement didn't work at all in on a spare motherboard I owned, but it did work in my main system. When I upgraded my motherboard, it failed to work, and was repaired by Gigabyte. Soon afterwards I went back to AMD and tried to sell the card to a friend. It failed to work in his PC, and was dumped.