Here at LowyatNET, we’ve more or less seen and heard the word on busted NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 cards and other models. From swapping out fake dies to drowning them in a sea of thermal paste, the most recent news is one of heartbreak and quite possibly, engineering negligence.
Our tale brings us to Vietnam, where a GPU repair shop reports it received a couple of “broken” RTX 5090 cards for repair. The first card was the easy one: some work had already been done to it before arrival, and its issues were that it had no power, the GPU wasn’t being detected, and it was missing one A1 VRAM package. No biggie, the shop said, and was able to repair it and return it on the same day.
The second RTX 5090 that came in was less fortunate. The shop said that the card had such severe burn damage that the 12VHPWR port appears to have just blown off from the PCB. The burn damage was so bad, it actually killed both the GPU die and surrounding VRAM.
The Vietnamese repair shop says in the now-deleted TikTok video that, for such an expensive card, it was surprising that it didn’t have additional protective measures to keep such things from happening to it, arguing that a fuse could have help prevent the GPU from catching fire. Then, to add insult to injury, the card’s owner said that the warranty for such incidents was not covered by the board partner.
On that note, it should be pointed out that the board partner wasn’t explicitly named by the Vietnamese repair shop, but the original video did show a Dell OEM model in the background, leading many to believe that this RTX 5090 was, in fact, an OEM model.
That being said, this has got to be one of the worst case of GPU abuse that we’ve seen to date, and again, we’ve reported on a lot of burnt-out 12VHPWR ports and cables over the years.
(Source: X, Videocardz)
