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.
