Typically, it’s higher to go away issues to the professionals. That’s the affordable conclusion you may come to watching this new video that showcases a restore store’s try and salvage a Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 that has been severely broken by its earlier proprietor’s modding endeavors. Whereas seemingly trying to use a voltage mod to the $1,500+ graphics card to spice up its efficiency, the proprietor rendered the cardboard practically inoperable, resulting in fairly the rescue mission from NorthWestRepair.
Making an attempt out mods to vary the voltage ranges on an already high-powered Nvidia graphics card just like the RTX 4090 isn’t a wise transfer if you happen to’re untrained. As our Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 evaluate exhibits, it’s the perfect graphics card you should buy proper now, however not solely does it take care of some severe voltages and present ranges – famously resulting in some playing cards setting themselves alight – however its electronics are nonetheless extremely delicate so the slightest slip up will be catastrophic.
The tried restore course of for this graphics card has been documented in a YouTube video by NorthWestRepair, and dropped at our consideration in a report by Tom’s {Hardware}. The video makes for a disturbing look ahead to these delicate to circuitry abuse. The cardboard had each purple warning signal you may think about, from lacking screws and guarantee seals to seen injury to the printed circuit board, together with an uncommon stage of thermal paste over a number of of the board’s chips.
The injury to this RTX 4090 didn’t cease there, nonetheless. Whereas the principle chips had been fortunately undamaged, together with the GPU chip itself, a number of smaller elements had been burnt out.
Fortunately, regardless of the board injury, and a few dangerous soldering to undo, the YouTuber was in a position to get this card again in working situation after a number of hours of toil and hassle.
Contemplating the injury, it’s unimaginable to see an RTX 4090 saved from the junk pile due to such a talented restore. As NorthWestRepair factors out in his video, the unique proprietor’s try “to achieve 5fps at finest” doesn’t appear significantly worthwhile. An out-of-warranty restore job on a damaged element is one factor, however attempting out your fundamental soldering abilities on an in any other case working and extremely costly graphics card is one other.
Fortunately, for these searching for a safer option to get a good sooner card than an RTX 4090, they gained’t have lengthy to attend. That’s as a result of next-gen RTX 5000 sequence graphics playing cards are anticipated to launch subsequent month on the CES 2025 commerce present, with the RTX 5090 anticipated to be a major step up in efficiency from the 4090. Not that we anticipate the cardboard to be low-cost, with the most recent RTX 5090 value rumors suggesting it is going to make even the RTX 4090 appear reasonably priced.
