
Nvidia reportedly denies RTX 5090 warranty over faded serial number — $6,500 GPU blemish not an isolated incident, according to customers
Nvidia has reportedly rejected a warranty claim for a GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition because the serial number on the metal bracket had faded. The affected user experienced hardware crashes and was denied an RMA despite providing original packaging and invoices for verification. Multiple other customers have reported similar issues, suggesting that the ink-based serial number printing is susceptible to erosion from the card's heat.
- ▪A UK-based user reported that Nvidia rejected their RTX 5090 RMA request because the serial number on the metal bracket was unreadable.
- ▪The serial number is printed with ink rather than laser-etched, making it vulnerable to fading from heat and oxidation over time.
- ▪Alternative methods for verifying the serial number, such as checking the PCIe connector sticker or using Nvidia SMI, were available but not accepted in the initial denial.
- ▪Other owners have reported similar warranty rejections, though some were able to resolve the issue by providing photographic evidence of the original packaging.
Tom's Hardware files mainly under tech. We currently carry 625 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Tom's Hardware |
| Canonical URL | https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/nvidia-reportedly-denies-rtx-5090-warranty-over-faded-serial-number-usd6-500-gpu-blemish-not-an-isolated-incident-according-to-customers |
| Publication time | Wed, 16 Sep 2026 10:45:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-16T10:53:41.447Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-16T10:53:41.447Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | yuKd8sO2uF8J · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
PC Components GPUs Nvidia reportedly denies RTX 5090 warranty over faded serial number — $6,500 GPU blemish not an isolated incident, according to customers News By Zhiye Liu Published 16 September 2026 The world's most expensive serial number When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. (Image credit: Getty Images) Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter The GeForce RTX 5090 is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of the best graphics cards.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Tom's Hardware.