Blown capacitor kills $2,799 Asus RTX 5090 GPU and damages motherboard

A Redditor has shared a story claiming that his Asus ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090 'caught on fire.' The sad tale of several $1,000s in high-tech components going up in smoke is backed by photographic evidence. Among the photos that Impossible-Weight485 published, we can see clear signs of damage near one of the graphics card's capacitors, and the damage seems to have spread to the motherboard.

Impossible-Weight485 describes how he played games on his PC when the system shut down without warning after he finished a gaming session and browsed some websites. The Redditor then did what most people would do: restart the PC. However, as the system powered up, "the GPU caught on fire, and smoke started coming out," they claim.

Burn marks are evident on both the graphics card and motherboard. On the graphics card, you can see the darkened, yellowed area of the PCB near a suspected blown capacitor. The Redditor also shows a burn mark on the Asus ROG Crosshair X870E Hero motherboard – just above and between the 'H' and 'E' in the HERO logo. This area will have aligned with the suspected blown graphics card capacitor when plugged into the board's first PCIe 5.0 x16 expansion slot.

So, here we have another RTX 5090 graphics card that has become damaged in what seems to be regular use. Perhaps we should be happy it isn't yet another power connector issue this time. Impossible-Weight485 shows this isn't likely to have anything to do with that power interface, as it looks pristine in one of the images they shared.

Asus's product page for the ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090 highlights the "unmatched reliability" and quality of this particular graphics card – which is premium priced even in RTX 5090 terms. Of course, a small percentage of all products will fail in everyday use, with most issues that get past manufacturing QA showing themselves after normal use. That's why guarantees of at least a year are essential.

While we can probably file this RTX 5090 that "caught on fire" as a slight defect in one of the components that managed to get past factory verification and testing, there are a lot of other problems piling up for would-be RTX 50 buyers to think about. Beyond the problem of actually acquiring one of these cards for a reasonable sum, only yesterday, we reported on Blackwell cards with BSOD and black screen issues and top-of-the-line RTX 5090 models missing ROPs – compared to online specs.