NVIDIA Reportedly Rejected RTX 5090 RMA Over Faded Serial Number

An RTX 5090 Founders Edition owner says NVIDIA turned down a warranty claim because the serial number on the card's metal bracket had faded past the point of being readable. According to a Reddit post on r/NVIDIA from user Willing-Avocado-4830, the card began throwing black screen crashes under heavy load, so the owner returned it to NVIDIA for an RMA. After roughly a month of waiting, NVIDIA reportedly rejected the claim with little explanation, and a follow-up email revealed the reason. The printed serial number was apparently too faded to confirm.

The owner claims to have never removed the bracket, and still has the original box and matching invoice. That raises an obvious question, since the same serial number is printed on the card's modular PCIe connector too, and can reportedly be pulled from Windows using NVIDIA's SMI tool, at least while the GPU still boots. NVIDIA rejecting an RMA simply due to a faded serial number is questionable, to say the least, especially with RTX 5090 stock already scarce and prices well above MSRP. Here's what the faded serial number looks like, according to another Redditor who shared this image. Read full story