Nvidia Reliability

[Lethagized]

I hardly used my 980Ti and it suddenly broke one day. I can only boot in safe mode at a res of 1024x768, any higher and it artifacts. I've seen a lot of other faulty Nvidia cards of this type also go faulty.

There wasn't any heatsink on my vram chips which is the first time I've seen that.

Was there a known production line issue for high end nvidia cards.

 

[Lethagized]

There wasn't any heatsinks on the vram chips.

 

[Lethagized]

I'm away from my computer right now and don't have any pics, but the 2 fans blow through the main heatsink fins onto the vram chips.
Only the core is cooled by the heatsink.

It's an Asus ROG Matrix Platinum.

Also, the reason I question Nvidia is, I've read 2 posts so far in this sub forum about recent card failures, plus there's tons of faulty 980ti sold on eBay.