Tuesday, February 4th 2025
Reports of Bricked NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 and RTX 5090D Surge
According to widespread user reports from Chinese tech forums and Reddit communities, multiple RTX 5090 and 5090D graphics cards are failing permanently after standard driver installation. The issue affects both the standard RTX 5090 and the export-modified 5090D variant released for the Chinese market on January 30th. Users report consistent failure patterns: upon initial driver installation, displays go dark, and systems permanently lose the ability to detect the GPU through both DisplayPort and HDMI interfaces. Hardware failures have been documented across multiple board partners, with Colorful, Manli, and Gigabyte cards showing identical symptoms. Third-party vendor reports sometimes indicate potential IC burn damage, suggesting hardware-level failure rather than recoverable software issues.
Some investigations point to PCIe Gen 5 implementation as a possible root cause. The RTX 5090 series represents NVIDIA's first fully Gen 5-compliant GPU architecture, introducing new signal integrity challenges. Some users report temporary mitigation by forcing PCIe 4.0 mode in BIOS settings, though this workaround remains unverified. Additional complications arise from modern motherboard designs that share PCIe lanes between M.2 storage and graphics slots. The failure pattern appears consistent across both domestic and international markets. On r/ASUS, users report identical detection failures persisting through CMOS resets and system rebuilds. Chinese forum documentation shows systematic failures across multiple board partner implementations, suggesting a fundamental architecture or driver compatibility issue rather than isolated manufacturing defects. NVIDIA has not issued official guidance on the failures.
Below are screenshots of the reported user problems:
Sources:
Chiphell, Baidu, Goofish, r/ASUS, via Wccftech
Some investigations point to PCIe Gen 5 implementation as a possible root cause. The RTX 5090 series represents NVIDIA's first fully Gen 5-compliant GPU architecture, introducing new signal integrity challenges. Some users report temporary mitigation by forcing PCIe 4.0 mode in BIOS settings, though this workaround remains unverified. Additional complications arise from modern motherboard designs that share PCIe lanes between M.2 storage and graphics slots. The failure pattern appears consistent across both domestic and international markets. On r/ASUS, users report identical detection failures persisting through CMOS resets and system rebuilds. Chinese forum documentation shows systematic failures across multiple board partner implementations, suggesting a fundamental architecture or driver compatibility issue rather than isolated manufacturing defects. NVIDIA has not issued official guidance on the failures.
84 Comments on Reports of Bricked NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 and RTX 5090D Surge
For the life of me, I still can’t understand why Nvidia has such a cult following worse than even Apple fans.
How is this even possible after all the review samples with no issues?
2000 Series - Teaches people the "importance" of Ray-Tracing. Lessons continue to this day.
:laugh:
By the way, it's funny that it's always x90 cards that have these problems, never below.
If this were the case, upon loading the driver, it could switch from a working, slower, PCIe speed to non-functional PCIe 5.0.
Unless this sets a persistent marker on the GPU itself though, display output would/should still be working fine until the OS loads the drivers.
It could then be that those having issues have Quick Start activated, and are Shutting Down instead of Restarting?
Or, perhaps, upon initializing PCIe 5.0 on certain motherboards, some component is being overloaded, and shorting out.
Without having a system fail in the hands of a reputable source, it is really hard to tell what is going on.
Hopefully it is properly investigated by nVidia, AIB, and MB manufacturers, with a timely fix being provided.
It's the gamers fault for being so cheap, the 5090 should have cost at least 10.000usd to get to QC
It's the kind of stuff that made them lose Apple as customers back the days (Geforce laptops would suffer a sudden death because the chip soldering was giving out. Bumpgate) They've lost billions, had to ship GPUs for free to replace those that died, and reportedly got verbally assaulted by Apple staff.
Grab your torches and rakes and head for Jensen's house!
Even the issues that get published are often brushed aside as rare cases, user errors, comments are ful of whataboutisms of fanboys that feel they have to defend their favourite megacorporation...
If you want to bring companies into this, they are held to an even higher standard as a simple "our products seem to fail" post, without a proper root-cause analysis can earn you criminal charges, since it can be interpreted as an attempt to manipulate stock.
There is a lot of protectionism around Nvidia so it’s hard to get good verifiable information whether it’s true or false.
I had a MB back during the end era of Vista (I started using Vista about a year before 7 released) when I upgraded to a new CPU/MB. I had multiple GPUs to test with (I think a GTX 280 and a 8800 GTS 512MB, but not 100% if those were the cards I had at the time....it's been a long while so memory might be off) when I had issues with a new MB.
Got everything setup and Vista installed - booted into Windows without a hitch.
Installed all the driver updates from the disc that came with the MB - no issues.
Installed the GPU driver and the system completely locked up. Windows would freeze most of the time or it would BSOD.
Maybe a GPU driver issue? Tried multiple WHQL drivers - same problem.
Maybe a GPU issue? Swapped GPUs, tried multiple drivers - same problem.
Maybe an OS issue? Wiped the drive, installed XP - no issue. Install GPU driver and the system would lock up. Tried the other GPU and multiple drivers - same problem.
I don't know what the problem was, but when I installed any driver for my cards the whole thing would lock up or occasionally BSOD. I contacted ASRock about it, their tech team asked me a slew of questions and offered suggestions and nothing worked. They said RMA. Got the replacement MB and the problem was no more.
This could be a driver issue or a MB issue with the 5090 having problems. Guess we just wait and see. Too bad for those that have a broken card, they're the ones that really have to suffer. Hopefully they have a backup GPU they can use for now.
No Gen 5 GPU products even existed up until now, so on field deployment it's bound to run into issues. Gen 5 PCIe testing equipment in labs is one thing, real world usage likely another beast altogether.
You even forgot about the possibility of driver issue to be a culprit here.Keep in mind that PCI-Express is a standard. BIOS is not meant to be updated on regular basis every time a new PCIE expansion card is released. Expansion card is not a processor.
BIOS - if it ain't broken, don't touch/fix it. Same applies to GPU BIOS.
As for your wondering, I had been using PCIE 2.0 board with PCIE 3.0 GPU for years, even my previous PCIE 3.0 board had BIOS version from around 2019 and I ran PCIE 4.0 GPU from 2022 on that board just fine. I only update BIOS when there is security patch involved, when there is added support for newer CPU I'm going to switch to, or when they fix performance-related issue that possibly negatively affected my system (memory speed support - though I do a thorough research here, because sometimes it turns out to be opposite - performance does not get actually improved).Are you implying that it is normal to cause failures when a first product that supports a new technology arrives? This should have been ironed months before date of release. It's not like they were supposed to do start from a scratch here. PCIE Gen 5.0 standard is known for years. It has exact specifications which are required to be fulfilled in order for a device to be compatible with the standard.
We still don't know whether this problem is related to PCIE 5.0 only. In the article, it is mentioned as one of thought possible causes.