Five minutes. That’s how long one gamer got to enjoy his Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced before his RTX 5090 went up in smoke.
Literal smoke. A ZOTAC RTX 5090 appears to have exploded after roughly five minutes of play, according to an unlucky player who shared the whole thing on Reddit.
The Reddit user, going by _CurrentlyPooping_, said he heard a strange noise within five minutes of opening the Ubisoft game. He was still in the tutorial. Right after that, his PC shut off hard and a cloud of smoke started pouring out of the case.
Notice what he didn’t do: point fingers. He genuinely doesn’t know what caused it, and he says so.
What we do know is the timeline. He’d just installed the latest drivers, version 610.74, before launching the game. About five minutes into the tutorial came a loud pop, then a series of crackling sounds, then the abrupt shutdown and the smoke.
The power connector, for what it’s worth, looks fine to him. And that’s the part that makes this strange.
The card wasn’t new or freshly tinkered with. It had run normally for a year with no changes and no moving the PC around, aside from bringing it to a new desk three or four months ago.
His worry now runs deeper than the GPU. He isn’t sure whether the motherboard took damage too, or whether it was the thing that caused the problem in the first place. He’s scared to plug any other component into it.
There’s a history here. He’d noticed weird issues with the USB ports before, so he plans to send the board off for RMA, meaning inspection, repair or replacement.
The system, for the curious:
Zotac GeForce RTX 5090 Solid Edition, paired with an MSI Tomahawk X870E.
From the photos, the RTX 5090 looks completely cooked. There’s visible damage all over it after the incident.
