The RTX 5090 was already a beast straight out of the box, an absurdly expensive, power-hungry monster that NVIDIA dropped in late February 2025 alongside the RTX 5080. But some people just can’t leave well enough alone, and honestly? That’s exactly what makes the enthusiast PC world so entertaining to follow. Until someone’s GPU physically cracks in half, that is.
That’s exactly what happened here, and yes, we mean literally cracked.
A GPU built for extremes meets its match
Among all the RTX 5090 custom variants we’ve seen since launch, the MSI RTX 5090 Lightning Z stands out as one of the most extreme builds to date.
We’re talking about a card equipped with a dual 12VHPWR connector setup, a beefy 40-phase VRM, and a stock power limit that sits around 1,200W, nowhere near the 575-600W that a standard RTX 5090 Founders Edition operates at. In practice, Alva Jonathan, an Indonesian YouTuber known for extreme overclocking, recorded real-world consumption closer to 750W at stock settings.
The numbers this card put up before disaster struck were genuinely impressive. In 3DMark Port Royal, while a standard RTX 5090 FE at 575W scores around 36,000-37,000 points, the Lightning Z at an 800W limit and 3.25 GHz overclock pushed all the way to 43,112 points.
With liquid nitrogen cooling, Alva managed to hit 3.6 GHz in GPUPI and even secured a world record in Geekbench 5 Compute Score with a staggering 683,433 points.
One world record. That’s all it got.
The 2,500W BIOS that ended it all
Not satisfied with breaking one record, Alva loaded up a special XOC BIOS unlocking a 2,500W power limit, yes, two thousand five hundred watts, to chase even higher clocks. At 1.2 volts, the GB202 chip simply couldn’t take it.
The GPU died, and when they inspected it, the chip had visibly fractured. The working theory is that the extreme voltage combined with the rapid thermal shock from liquid nitrogen caused the silicon to physically crack under stress.
To put this in perspective, the GALAX RTX 5090 HOF XOC Edition already pushed things with a 2,001W BIOS and that was considered wild. The Lightning Z’s 2,500W takes it to a different dimension entirely, one where physics eventually shows up and reminds you who’s boss.
Alva himself admitted this was the most powerful GPU he’d ever worked with, but he couldn’t hide his disappointment. The card had everything going for it, the hardware, the cooling, the BIOS, and it still met its end chasing a few extra megahertz.
At the end of the day, this is what extreme overclocking looks like at its absolute edge: spectacular results right up until the moment something gives out. One world record isn’t a bad way to go out for a GPU, but for a card that costs thousands of dollars, it’s a brutal reminder that even the most extreme hardware has a breaking point, sometimes quite literally.
So what do you think, totally worth it for a world record, or just an insanely expensive way to crack a chip? Drop your take in the comments!