Are the 50 series card not up to standard?

The other day I was speaking to a buddy of mine who works for a PC components retailer about my RMA'd 5080. He mentioned to me that due to the fact that some of the 50 series cards have got manufacturing faults, made worse by the issues with the 12V HPWR, that I was just unlucky and got a "bad card".

What really got me was that I had hardly any time to play games, and the GPU load was low over the past few months. The last time this happened to me was with my Radeon HD 5970.

Do you guys share the opinion that the Nvidia 50 series is not up to standard?