MEDIA BIOS

What happens when you bork a REVIEW SAMPLE GPU?

- Phil Iwaniuk

Top three worst feelings in PC gaming? Third place is opening Steam after a week away and having to download 3.9 petabytes of updates. Second is obviously RGB radiation sickness. Top, spot, though? It has to be a hardware upgrade gone awry.

For starters, the stakes are so high. Particularly in this preposterous 2025 reality we find ourselves in, when one graphics card alone costs five times more than a console. Damaging a RTX 5090 is almost akin to writing off your car now, except worse, because you don't need your car to play Cyberpunk 2077.

But then there's the sheer amount of work involved in rectifying the mistake. Generally, the extent of your knowledge is 'it doesn't turn on' or 'it doesn't boot to Windows'. The number of variables which might explain why that's happening are as numerous as the molecules in the universe, and the only way to ascertain which one's relevant in your case is to search through of forum posts by people who had similar issues.

BENCH WARMER

There's a worse feeling, though: having that happen when it's a review unit. Of a really expensive graphics card. On a deadline. The year was 2011, and Asus had just released the ROG Ares, a modded version of AMD's Radeon HD 5970 dual-GPU card. The price? One thousand US dollars.