TECH NEWS – Asus’ ROG Astral is considered a premium RTX 5090 graphics card, but it hasn’t escaped a serious failure…

There have been some scary stories about the GeForce RTX 5090 lately. Previously it was the 12-pin power connectors that melted, but now it’s the graphics card that’s gone bad, and you can read more about it on Reddit. If it had happened while the user was playing, we could understand, because the card still draws 575W (enough to power a whole PC!), but that’s not the case!

The user was playing, but had stopped, so the top of the line Blackwell architecture wasn’t under that much load, because they were just browsing a few web pages, and that doesn’t require the full capacity of the graphics card. This wasn’t a Founders Edition or a base model, as Asus’ ROG Astral is the top of the line (and it shows in the price). They detailed what happened before the failure.

My 5090 astral caught on fire
byu/Impossible-Weight485 innvidia

The user’s computer suddenly shut down, then after rebooting the RTX 5090 started up. In the images below, you can see that the card’s circuitry was burned, and the motherboard chipset’s heat sink also showed signs of heat. This was near the PCI-E interface and was probably due to the multilayer ceramic capacitor (MLCC). This is commonly used for better reliability and more stable performance.

The MLCC was not of the right quality and there may have been a manufacturing error. Unlike electrolytic capacitors, MLCCs do not explode, but they can crack from overheating and leave burn marks around them due to voltage fluctuations or mechanical stress, but poor quality can also cause this. Gamers Nexus, a YouTube channel, has asked users to send in their GPUs so that experts can analyze the card.

This brings the total to five faults around the card: melting 12-pin connectors, a black screen, missing ROPs (we wrote about this yesterday), burning capacitors and a lack of stock…

Source: WCCFTech