We've taken a look at two successful repair attempts recently, a dead RTX 5090 and a dead RX 7800 XT being revived from the silicon grave. However, it's equally important to see the other side of the coin — what happens when the repair doesn't go right? What if the card is fated beyond a fix? That's what occurred with Northwest Repair's latest job, where a specially endowed RTX 4090 turned out to be more deeply dead-and-buried than initially imagined.
A heavily modified RTX 4090 with a rare 48GB memory PCB showed up on Tony's bench, courtesy of a customer who’d already tried fixing it themselves with a brutal 21-volt, 21-amp voltage injection. Spoiler alert: it didn’t end well. This wasn’t a standard card either, this custom PCB had double the memory of a standard RTX 4090 but came with all the risks of poor cooling and cheap power components. Tony later called 48GB cards unreliable, due to the events that unfold.
