✨ We've just launched our NEW website design!

Learn More Here
News

Driver Updates Appear to be Bricking Some RTX 5090 Graphics Cards? …Uh-Oh!

From flagship gaming hardware to a humble lightbulb, it doesn’t matter how expensive the thing is, hardware failures happen. Even on the best-made components, you have to expect a small percentage will just fall foul of some manufacturing error or something similar. However, when that hardware is your brand new £2000 (if you’re lucky) flagship Nvidia RTX 5090 or RTX 5090D, you’re going to be pretty f-ing pissed when it fails within a week of purchase… I mean, who wouldn’t be?

Well, the latest news according to some Chinese forums, as well as reddit, which admittedly can be hit or miss when it comes to finding the truth of any matter, that’s exactly what is happening. There are multiple claims that RTX 5090 and 5090D GPUs have been permanently bricked due to a hardware error caused by… software, no I’m not joking.

Driver Updates

A simple driver installation, as in the GPU drivers that you need to operate the card properly, maybe killing the cards. Users are claiming that when they start the driver installation their display goes dark. Then the GPU is no longer detected the GPU and the DisplayPort and HDMI stop functioning entirely. In short, the card is dead, simple as that.

It’s not just one brand either, with the likes of ASUS, Colorful, Gigabyte, and Manli already mentioned, and no doubt more will follow soon enough. It’s not as simple as “let’s install a different driver” or “flash the BIOS” to fix it either. This appears to be burn damage to the IC, making it a software issue that’s causing a hardware-level failure. The only way to fix that, I’m guessing is physically replacing the IC by sending the card for repair, or fully replacing the GPU with a brand new one.

RTX 5090 / RTX 5090D

While some are speculating that it has to do with the PCIe Gen5 implementation, and have suggested forcing the card to use PCIe 4.0 in your motherboard BIOS, this is as yet unconfirmed internet banter, but I mean, it likely couldn’t hurt to do it in the meantime… I wouldn’t think.

The only thing we can do now is uhm, maybe don’t install drivers for your RTX 5090. Then maybe wait for Nvidia to look into it, and then maybe hope there’s a fix for all this. I mean, there’s a small pinch of hope it’s all internet trolling or something else entirely, but looking at these posts on chiphell, baidu, goofish, and /r/asus, I think there’s a real issue here.

Peter Donnell

As a child in my 40's, I spend my day combining my love of music and movies with a life-long passion for gaming, from arcade classics and retro consoles to the latest high-end PC and console games. So it's no wonder I write about tech and test the latest hardware while I enjoy my hobbies!

Related Articles

Back to top button
Close

Adblock Detected

Please consider supporting us by disabling your ad blocker!   eTeknix prides itself on supplying the most accurate and informative PC and tech related news and reviews and this is made possible by advertisements but be rest assured that we will never serve pop ups, self playing audio ads or any form of ad that tracks your information as your data security is as important to us as it is to you.   If you want to help support us further you can over on our Patreon!   Thank you for visiting eTeknix