Broken PCIe fingers are becoming a frustrating trend among Nvidia’s latest flagship graphics cards based on its RTX 5090 Founders Edition design. Computer technician NorthridgeFix on YouTube published a video detailing the story of one of his customers who suffered such bad luck on not just any high-end RTX Blackwell GPU, but Nvidia’s crazy-expensive $10,000 RTX Pro 6000 workstation graphics card. According to the video, the card snapped under its own weight during transit after the unfortunate owner (a tech YouTuber with 40 million subscribers, apparently) didn’t uninstall it before moving it.
The technician showed off the PCIe connector itself on the now $10,000 paperweight, revealing that it snapped cleanly into two pieces near the middle. Due to the component’s complexity, it is impossible to repair the PCIe connector, so a replacement part is required.
$10k RTX Pro 6000 PCIe Board broke – No Replacement Part from Nvidia – YouTube
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If only that were actually feasible — NorthridgeFix revealed that Nvidia astonishingly does not provide any replacement parts for its OEM graphics cards, despite them boasting a design that allows easy repairability of the PCIe connector alone.
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NorthridgeFix revealed this is a big problem with Nvidia’s latest Founders Edition designs and spoke about a previous encounter he had with a customer who accidentally broke their RTX 5090 Founders Edition while installing a waterblock. After inspecting the damaged RTX 5090, the technician reported that if Nvidia had provided replacement parts, the card could have been saved.
We covered this story and how the user got a free RTX 5090 Founders Edition replacement from Nvidia. Apparently, Nvidia watched NorthridgeFix’s rant on YouTube about the lack of replacement parts for their GPUs, and that was enough to get Nvidia to replace the broken card for free, even though it was technically the customer’s fault for breaking it with a waterblock in the first place.
Hopefully, the same thing will happen with the customer of the now-dead RTX Pro 6000 workstation card. Nvidia’s latest flagship Founders Edition graphics card design has the unique trait of having modularity in its design, something that is very uncommon in the graphics card world. The RTX 5090 Founders Edition and RTX Pro 6000 graphics cards are made up of three primary PCBs, including a PCB that houses all of the important bits like the GPU core, VRAM, and power delivery system, and a secondary PCB that is only responsible for providing PCIe connectivity to the graphics card.
This design, by nature, makes them uniquely well designed for repairability, at least in theory. If the PCIe connector on a traditional graphics card fails, either the whole PCB has to be replaced or the connector has to be repaired. Both require specialized tools and a qualified technician to do the job. With Nvidia’s latest Blackwell OEM graphics cards, their design should allow you to simply swap out the PCIe connector component with a replacement part as if you were replacing DRAM on a motherboard. However, as this unfortunate user found out, Nvidia doesn’t dish out the parts, rendering the modular and repairable design somewhat obsolete.
Maybe one day Nvidia will provide replacement PCBs for its flagship graphics cards, but for now, if you own one of these cards, NorthridgeFix warns users that these graphics cards are not easily repairable. If the card breaks, there’s a good chance you’ll have to beg Nvidia customer support for an entirely new GPU replacement.
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