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 to salvage a Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 that has been severely broken by its earlier proprietor’s modding endeavors. Whereas seemingly making an attempt to use a voltage mod to the $1,500+ graphics card to spice up its efficiency, the proprietor rendered the cardboard almost inoperable, resulting in fairly the rescue mission from NorthWestRepair.
Making an attempt out mods to alter the voltage ranges on an already high-powered Nvidia graphics card just like the RTX 4090 isn’t a sensible transfer should you’re untrained. As our Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 overview reveals, it’s one of the best graphics card you should purchase 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 pink warning signal you may think about, from lacking screws and guarantee seals to seen injury to the printed circuit board, together with an uncommon degree 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 parts had been burnt out.
Fortunately, regardless of the board injury, and a few unhealthy soldering to undo, the YouTuber was capable of get this card again in working situation after a number of hours of toil and bother.
Contemplating the injury, it’s unimaginable to see an RTX 4090 saved from the junk pile because of such a talented restore. As NorthWestRepair factors out in his video, the unique proprietor’s try “to realize 5fps at greatest” doesn’t appear significantly worthwhile. An out-of-warranty restore job on a damaged element is one factor, however attempting out your fundamental soldering expertise on an in any other case working and extremely costly graphics card is one other.
Fortunately, for these searching for a safer approach to get a fair sooner card than an RTX 4090, they received’t have lengthy to attend. That’s as a result of next-gen RTX 5000 collection graphics playing cards are anticipated to launch subsequent month on the CES 2025 commerce present, with the RTX 5090 anticipated to be a big step up in efficiency from the 4090. Not that we anticipate the cardboard to be low cost, with the most recent RTX 5090 worth rumors suggesting it’ll make even the RTX 4090 appear reasonably priced.
