Hardware repair specialist, Northridge Fix, recently posted a video of his attempt to repair a custom-modded NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition (FE). Their overall thoughts culminate in a sobering message and a warning of their own: do not purchase the FE version of NVIDIA’s flagship Blackwell GPU.
To provide some background: a customer sent in two RTX 5090 GPUs for repair, after both cards ceased working after installing water blocks. One of them was an ASUS TUF gaming model, which was resurrected. The modified FE card, though, wasn’t so lucky.
Northridge Fix breaks down the issues he found with the RTX 5090 FE card. His biggest complaint was that NVIDIA made its flagship GPU modular – the card is made up of several interconnected parts. They found that the card’s PCIe connector was attached to the main board via a small and “very fragile FPC connector”. They deduced that, during disassembly, the connector clearly couldn’t take the stress of being repeatedly removed. “The 5090 is a very heavy card,” he noted, “and when you start adding fragile joints between major components, you’re just asking for trouble.”
“The old style graphics cards was working. Why do you want to make it modular?” he expresses in his video. “What’s the point of designing it in two pieces if you can’t buy the connector that joins them?” the technician asked. “If one pin goes bad, the whole GPU is dead, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Sadly, Northridge Fix had no choice but to repair the RTX 5090 FE’s casing to the customer, telling them that the GPU itself was unfixable without a replacement connector.
(Source: Northridge Fix via YouTube)
