A Reddit user, Impossible-Weight485, reported that his ASUS ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090, which costs upwards of $2,800, suddenly caught fire. According to him, the issue occurred sometime after he finished gaming.
- I was playing PC games this afternoon, and when I was done with the games, my PC suddenly shut down while I was browsing websites. When I restarted the PC, the GPU caught on fire, and smoke started coming out. When I took out the GPU, I saw burn marks on both the GPU and the motherboard.
— RTX 5090 owner
According to VideoCardz, the problem does not appear to be related to the power connector or cables. The burnt components were located on the PCIe interface side, and the damage on the motherboard confirms that the fire occurred. Based on the photos, a multilayer ceramic capacitor (MLCC) was severely burned, which was likely the source of the fire.
Steve Burke, the creator of the Gamers Nexus YouTube channel, offered to buy the damaged GPU at full price to investigate the issue further. VideoCardz noted that this is the only known case of an ROG Astral GPU catching fire so far.
