The new graphics cards of the NVIDIA RTX 50 series were hot, hot, hot, Sell in a few minutes after launch. And although our criticisms of RTX 5080 And RTX 5090 Spotted with big faults, especially in the first, whoever has undoubtedly managed to get their hands on one is delighted.
Except that some first buyers are now reporting serious instability problems with both. Not what you want to hear after putting thousands on a card …
Some RTX 5080 and 5090 cards are made completely unusable due to pilot and organic problems, reports Tom material. These “brick” cards affect the editions of the founder and the variants of AIB partners, including the exclusive RTX 5090D in China.
GPUS 50-serials who died after updating the pilot
Although the deep cause of these brick cards is always undetermined, most reports indicate that problems occur after the installation of the last Nvidia pilots A few days agowhich brought new DLSS 4 features to new and older GPUs.
The pilot update seems to cause GPU initialization failures, black screens and PCIe 5.0 instability (that is, the GPU will not start in PCIe 5.0 mode). Some users say that the reversal of pilots solves their problems, but the update does not make certain cards recognized by mother cards and / or windows, which makes the declines impossible.
The problems mainly seem to affect RTX 5090 cards and do not seem to be linked to a particular manufacturer. A Reddit user also reported a problem with his RTX 5080, which did not work in PCIe 2.0 mode after the latest drivers.
We suspect that this instability could have been avoided if the manufacturers had more time to prepare before publishing their cards. As Roman “8auer” Hartung explains in his Video on the RTX 5090 output debacleSome companies have apparently less than a week old to prepare for the appropriate drivers. It is a chronology far too tight for such a large version, especially for high-end cards as expensive as these.
What now?
Nvidia has not yet addressed these alleged problems with the RTX 5090 and 5080 cards, so we do not know with certainty what are the problems and if they are due to incompatibilities or user errors (for example, the use of the bad motherboard).
In any case, if you are affected by these problems, you can try to back up your drivers to see if it corrects things. Otherwise, contact the NVIDIA support and wait for new pilot updates before trying experimental solutions. In the case of a permanently damaged card, you will have to request a RMA.
Of course, with RTX 50 standard cards out of stock everywhere and Up to 16 weeks for replenishmentYou will probably not have a replacement anytime soon. We will know more in the coming days.
This article originally appeared on our sister publication Welt PC and has been translated and located in German.