No you literally hypothesize . There ' s a fundamental flaw in your argument considering the equation you quoted from stack exchange and given the temp ratings agreed upon based on the modelcomposition of the caps . Your Life degradation equation only has a negative exponent and exponential decay if and only if the operating temperature exceeds the temp rating . Up and close to it or being just below it has 0 impact on the life expectancy of the component given that equation . The testing confirmed that at no point were the hottest parts of the cards reaching temperatures that high under the worst possible scenario . Average users were not subjecting their cards to this extreme situation and thus couldn ' t have broken that threshold to degrade the components .