The GeForce RTX 5090 D, a variant of NVIDIA’s new flagship “Blackwell” GPU for gamers, creators, and developers that was designed for the Chinese market and tweaked to comply with U.S. export rules, may fail to be recognized upon installing the latest GeForce driver, which NVIDIA rolled out last week to usher in DLSS 4 and its new family of GeForce RTX 50 Series GPUs, according to several complaints that have surfaced over Chinese social media channels following the 5090 D’s launch, including some who say that their 25,000 yuan graphics card have turned into a “brick.”
“After installing the driver, the screen goes black, the graphics card cannot be recognized, and the same thing happens after changing the DP port to HDMI,” reads one machine-translated complaint that can be found on the Chip Hell forums. “This time, the 90 series only released a small amount, and several of them were affected,” the poster goes on to claim.
“The latest news is that our group member’s newly bought 5090D became a brick after the driver was updated,” another said on China’s search giant Baidu before going on to point out some of the premiums that they had to pay in order to obtain the GPU. “The group member paid 6,000 yuan more to buy it. After the driver was updated, the graphics card could not be recognized. It has been sent for personal insurance. There are similar cases abroad. Please be cautious when buying the first batch of 5090.”
“RTX 5090D first bricked, don’t rush to buy 5090 at home and abroad,” warns another poster on China’s Goofish platform. “All 5090 and 5090D have exploded, which may be due to core burn. At present, even if you don’t enter the system, the card is not recognized in the bios.”
“The current known information: the driver will cause the graphics card to crash with a high probability, a small probability of screen distortion, and an extremely small probability of IC burnout,” a machine translation of the post continues. “I got it and plugged it in. It had all kinds of problems and became a brick. It was so miserable. It seems to be a driver problem. I installed it and it became a brick. Renaissance Starship 5090d. (I have asked the victim for authorization. I bought a new card for 25,000 yuan)”
“I bought an RTX 5090 but it is not detected on Windows in the device manager, nor by the NVIDIA drivers, nor in the BIOS,” reads another post on the ASUS subreddit, one that would suggest this issue may extend to the regular GeForce RTX 5090. “The LED on the graphics card is lit and the fans are running.”
“It is fixed by changing PCIE5.0 into 4.0 in bios. You can have a try,” recommended one user, although that didn’t seem to help.