Caught on camera: MSI RTX 5090 catches fire on first boot

At this point, an RTX 50 series GPU catching fire or short circuiting is not surprising. A lot of people have lost expensive GPUs because of something either being wrong with the power cables or the GPU itself. And the burnouts are not limited to Nvidia either. However, this time, a user in China was able to catch the top tier RTX 5090 GPU go up in flames on camera and unfortunately, it was right after they put together a new system.

The video was posted on BiliBili, a Chinese streaming and video hosting platform, by user “Staying up late is equivalent to dying early” (machine translated). It shows an unlucky owner of a new MSI GeForce RTX 5090 Trio recording the first boot, and the GPU immediately catching fire. There are sparks around the heatsink and the PCIe connector area, and flames can be seen erupting, just as the user turns the system off.

The account that posted the video shared information about the aftermath, seemingly confirming that it was a faulty GPU. The PSU wiring was undamaged and everything else is working fine. Of course, there is an obvious burn mark on the motherboard chipset. The user switched back to an RTX 5060 which is working fine in the same system. What’s even more unfortunate is that since it was an RTX 5090 and not an RTX 5090D, there is no official support or chance of RMA. The user will have to take the card to a third-party repair shop and hope they can salvage it.

UNIKO's Hardware, the X account that shared the video, believes that the multiple locations for the fire suggest the VRM circuit and the VRAM were impacted. If that’s true, repairing the card would not be feasible. This is not the first case of an RTX GPU catching fire, but typically it’s the power cables that get burnt. And, it’s not just the beefy cards that have been impacted as there have been cases of RTX 4060 TI GPUs melting as well.