We all knew the RTX 5090 ran hot but not like this: Chinese gamer records the moment their GPU catches alight

A user's freshly installed RTX 5090 GPU catches alight upon first boot. — (Image credit: BiliBili, 晚睡等于早死)

It's every PC tinkerer's worst nightmare: an electrical fire. One unlucky Chinese gamer recorded the moment they first powered on their rig with a freshly plugged-in Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090, only to capture the card sparking and igniting.

The terrifying clip was first uploaded to BiliBili earlier this week and has since earned almost 100,000 views. Thankfully, it ends with the user quickly powering off the rig and extinguishing the flame before it gets out of control.

The RTX 5090 is not officially sold in China due to US export restrictions (last year, MSI denied selling the cards in China after pictures surfaced showing giant pallets of the restricted GPUs in the country). In this case, the BiliBili user admitted to using a proxy to secure the card. Unfortunately, that means they bought it without a warranty and therefore have no real recourse for this dangerous hardware failure. Their current plan is to contact the proxy seller after the Lunar New Year holiday—good luck to 'em.

Nvidia RTX 5090 Founders Edition graphics card on different backgrounds — (Image credit: Future)

This isn't the first time we've covered hardware issues with the RTX 5090, though little has been quite as bum-clenching as this clip. While der8auer claimed last year that Nvidia's RTX 5090 Founders Edition graphics card may be prone to melting power connectors, high-performance PC builder Falcon Northwest was not able to replicate the issue. Melty cables aside, repair techs also dislike the Founders Edition 5090 because of how difficult it is to source replacements for a key internal connector, as well as the "stupid design" of the card's twin circuit boards.

In his Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition review, Dave said the graphics card was "only incrementally faster in comparison with the performance bumps from Turing to Ampere to Ada [in terms of brute force rendering]." Rumours abound about an RTX 5090-beating GPU from Nvidia launching around September this year, so we may soon see the original card left in the dust anyway.

But in the here and now, graphics card pricing is still brutal, and Best Buy takes the biscuit with a $5090 asking price for the MSI Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 32G LIGHTNING Z Liquid Cooled Graphics Card. We covered this truly monstrous watercooled card last month, particularly the fact that it offers a TDP of 1000 W. No, unfortunately my finger didn't slip.

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Jess has been writing about games for over ten years, spending the last seven working on print publications PLAY and Official PlayStation Magazine. When she’s not writing about all things hardware here, she’s getting cosy with a horror classic, ranting about a cult hit to a captive audience, or tinkering with some tabletop nonsense.

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