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

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We’re continuing to see reports of RTX 5090 graphics cards failing. It seems NVIDIA’s hardware is struggling to handle demanding tasks, leading to breakdowns – often accompanied by a burning plastic odor. One owner pointed out the potential danger, as they frequently leave their computer running overnight for rendering, which could have caused a fire.

MSI GeForce RTX 5090 Suprim Liquid on fire

Okay, so I was reading this post by Frygon on the r/pcmasterrace subreddit, and his story totally freaked me out. He was working in Unreal Engine when his screen just went black. After a restart, he got a D6 error, which basically meant his graphics card wasn’t being detected. Then he smelled burning plastic! Luckily, he managed to unplug everything just in time – it sounds like a disaster was narrowly avoided. It’s a situation a lot of us have probably worried about happening to our rigs.

Up to six of the pins were severely damaged, with melting occurring in just one. Der8auer highlighted this issue back in February. Despite using water cooling, which the owner hoped would prevent damage, the device still failed.

I spent $3000 on this graphics card, hoping its powerful liquid cooler would prevent overheating. Unfortunately, even that isn’t enough to fix the issues caused by the poorly designed power connector. I’m really disappointed to have spent so much money on a flawed product.

Frygon explained that the problem could have been much more serious if the computer hadn’t been shut down when it was. While fires involving RTX 5090 graphics cards are rare, there have been a few reports of graphics cards catching fire.

I’ve been seeing a lot of comments about a worrying trend – a lot of people are reporting their RTX 5090s are burning up, and it seems like a surprisingly high number of those are MSI cards. It’s not always the card itself, though. Just recently, someone said their MSI card fried again, but then they mentioned they have a really small computer case – an ITX build – and that massive graphics card might just be too much for it.

Frygon plans to use the warranty on his MSI GeForce RTX 5090 Suprim Liquid since he’s only owned it for five months, but he’s still concerned it might fail again.

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2025-10-21 15:32