Comment by mschuster91

"Soldergate" impacted all vendors that shipped nVIDIA chipsets back at the time, and the cause was not "cheap" solder - rather, the back-then relatively new lead-free solder that was mandated by the European Union's RoHS directive in ~2005-2006. The manufacturers didn't have much experience with the stuff back then and chose a solder formulation that didn't hold up well to repetitive thermal stress.