People’s RTX 5090s are bricking themselves, and nobody quite knows why

Did you manage to score an RTX 5090 during the release windows? There’s a good chance that you didn’t; after all, the card is

suffering from a major stock issue right now
, and people speculate that new ones won’t become available for months. Well, if you’re stuck with an old card for now, you can at least take solace that the 5090 series is having a weird bricking issue, and nobody quite knows why they’re breaking.

Nvidia’s new RTX 5090 is reportedly suffering from bricking issues

As reported by TweakTown, people are taking to forums to report that their 5090 or 5090D (the Chinese variant) has bricked itself. So far, the reports claim that the 5090s sold by Colorful, Manli, Gigabyte, and Asus have this issue.

Nobody quite knows what, exactly, is causing this issue. However, it seems to trigger when someone goes to update the graphics card driver. Once the driver is applied, the screen will go black, and the computer will no longer recognize it.

One poster on a Chinese forum has a theory as to why the drive update is causing broken cards:

The RTX 5090D is bricked on its first release. Don’t rush to buy 5090s from home and abroad. All 5090Ds have exploded, possibly due to a burned core. Currently, even if you don’t enter the system, the card is not recognized in the BIOS. The current known information: the driver will cause the graphics card to crash with a high probability, with a small probability of screen distortion, and a very small probability of IC burn.

While Nvidia has a nasty and expensive issue on its hands, Intel is likely poised to gain from this. After all, there are plenty of reasons why Intel’s Battlemage GPUs are what the market needs, and now is the perfect time for the company to gain a foothold on the market while Team Green flounders.