Repair tech says RTX 5090 Founders Edition has 'one of the worst designs' in GPU history

Northridge Fix is an electronics repair shop in Los Angeles, California, with over a decade of experience covering all things tech. It also has a successful YouTube channel detailing the various repairs it has undertaken, from laptops that wouldn't power on with no display to dead GPUs. The latest video focuses on the latter, specifically a damaged GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition.

"One thing I can tell you, never in your life buy a 5090 Founders Edition," Northridge Fix states in the opening section of the video. Strong words, and before we go through the reasons as to why Northridge Fix has strong feelings about NVIDIA's Founders Edition design, it's worth quickly going through what makes the GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition one of the most unique modern GPU releases to date.

Not only does it sport Double Flow Through cooling, but the dual-slot GPU includes a complex, compact, and modular PCB with a separate PCIe interface. At the time of the GPU's release earlier this year, the connectors inside the GPU were described by many as fragile, and the design wasn't considered suitable for custom water-cooling mods in the same way a traditional partner GeForce RTX 5090 would.

In defense of the GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition depicted in this video. It's a modded unit with a custom water block. However, that doesn't stop Northridge Fix from calling it "one of the worst designs in the history of video cards." Basically, the faulty unit stopped working after the third-party water block mod was installed, due to the modular design and a "very fragile FPC connector" connecting the PCB to the PCIe interface.

Northridge Fix's main issue is the RTX 5090 Founders Edition's complex multi-piece design, which adds more potential points of failure. And the fragile connector on the PCIe side, with many tiny pins, was the reason this RTX 5090 failed - with a single pin damaged during the modding process. And without a replacement option for the connector, Northridge Fix recommends that the GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition should not only not be opened, but also avoided in favor of partner cards with more traditional designs.