„There was a noticeable stench of burnt plastics.” The RTX 5090, which was 5 months old, burned up

Months keep passing by, and we're still hearing about more and more busted RTX 5090 cards. NVIDIA hardware can't handle the load and ends up breaking down, often with that distinct burnt plastic smell. The owner of the damaged model noted that a tragedy could have occurred, as they often leave their computer on at night for rendering.

MSI GeForce RTX 5090 Suprim Liquid on fire

The situation that user Frygon described on the r/pcmasterrace subreddit sounds a lot like stuff we've seen before. While working in Unreal Engine, the screen suddenly went black, and after restarting the computer, an error D6 appeared, indicating the absence of a graphics card. That's when Frygon finally noticed the smell of burning plastic and managed to unplug the cable from the device just in time.

Source: u/Frygon; Reddit

As many as six pins were completely burned, and importantly, the plastic melted in only one of them. This fact was pointed out by der8auer back in February of this year. Looks like the water cooling didn't save the device, even though the owner was counting on it:

According to Frygon, the situation could have ended worse because the computer was turned off at the last moment before things went south. There haven't been many real-life cases of RTX 5090 cards catching fire, but there have been reports of some graphics cards going up in flames.

In the comments, people pointed out that a suspiciously high number of burnt RTX 5090 cards are from MSI, even though it's not always just the graphics card's fault. At the beginning of October, one user reported that her MSI equipment burned out again, but later added that her computer has an ITX format case, which is too small for such a massive graphics card.

Frygon's definitely going to use the warranty since he's only had his MSI GeForce RTX 5090 Suprim Liquid for five months, but he's still going to worry about it breaking down again.

• gaming
• MSI
• graphics cards
• technical problems (hardware)
• Nvidia RTX