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HP is discounting its HyperX Omen Max 16 gaming laptop by $1,000, bringing the price down to $3,699.99. The machine pairs a mobile Nvidia RTX 5090 GPU with a 16-inch 1600p OLED display running at 240Hz, an Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus processor, 32GB of DDR5 RAM, and a 2TB SSD.
Brazilian YouTube channel TecLab modified a Galax HOF OC LAB RTX 5090 to run on three 8-pin Mini-Fit Jr. power connectors instead of Nvidia's dual 16-pin design, by rewiring the Sense 0 and Sense 1 pins to fool the card into recognizing the new configuration. The card still hit its full 575W TDP and ran stable at 3.4GHz across load tests up to 900W and 120A peak current, with temperatures staying around 35°C and no firmware changes needed.
YouTube modding channel TecLab rebuilt a Galax RTX 5090D HOF OC LAB XOC by removing its dual 16-pin power connectors and soldering in three 8-pin PCIe connectors directly to the power regulators, rewiring sense pins to remove power limits. Using liquid cooling, they pushed the card from 400W up to 900W, drawing over 120A and hitting clock speeds of 3,400 MHz, all through hardware changes alone with no BIOS or software tuning.
NVIDIA's new DLSS 5 neural rendering technology launches with NBA 2K27, adding finer skin texture and improved shadow detail to player and crowd models. Testing on an RTX 5090 at 4K showed the feature nearly halved frame rates, dropping from 240fps to 150fps, while offering little visible improvement in wide-angle gameplay shots.
Independent testers have built two unofficial fixes for DLSS 5's steep performance cost, which Nvidia's own benchmarks showed can nearly halve frame rates on RTX 50-series cards. One method, a ReShade add-on called Neural Upstream, reorders the pipeline so the neural pass runs on the smaller pre-upscaled image rather than the full output frame, cutting its processing load by roughly two-thirds of the pixel count. Early tests on an RTX 4080 in Assassin's Creed Shadows show the neural rendering overhead dropping from about 32 FPS to 13 FPS lost, a 61% improvement, with similar gains reported in other titles.
Tom's Hardware benchmarked Alibaba's newly released Qwen3.8 27B open-weight AI model across discrete GPUs like the RTX 5090, RTX 4090, RTX 3090, and AMD/Intel cards, as well as unified-memory systems including the DGX Spark, Mac Studio, and Ryzen AI Halo. Despite the four-bit quantized model needing only about 17GB of VRAM, the tests found that software stacks and inference engines often bottleneck real-world performance, affecting time-to-first-token and throughput once context windows fill up.
A scammer in Germany sold at least two 'hollow' GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards, stripped of their GPU die and memory chips, to unsuspecting buyers who paid thousands of dollars for worthless hardware. One victim bought a used Palit RTX 5090 GameRock OC for about $2,090, even meeting the seller in person, but had no way to test the card before handing over cash. Hardware enthusiast Roman 'der8auer' Hartung publicized the cases after uncovering the scheme.
A HardOCP forum user reported that their MSI RTX 5090 Gaming Trio OC suffered a melted 16-pin power connector after testing Nvidia's new DLSS 5 feature in NBA 2K27, currently the only game with official support. The user's monitoring software showed sustained power draw above 610W, more than 150W higher than the card's typical 450W gaming load, before the connector overheated and several pins were visibly scorched.
At PAX West in Seattle, Nvidia is offering its Founder's Edition RTX 5090, RTX 5080, and RTX 5070 graphics cards at list price on-site, along with GeForce Trading Cards, while supplies last. GeForce Evangelist Jacob Freeman announced the in-person Verified Priority Access event on X, inviting attendees to find him for a chance at an MSRP card. This follows a similar giveaway at QuakeCon last month.
Nvidia confirmed DLSS 5 will officially launch this week, with NBA 2K27 as its sole debut title, ahead of a wider rollout to other games. Nvidia's own 4K benchmarks show only the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090, using 6X Multi Frame Generation plus DLSS Performance mode, with underlying render rates of roughly 39 and 62 FPS before frame generation inflates the final numbers to 233 and 370 FPS.
Nvidia's RTX 5090, originally launched at $1,999, is now selling for around $5,090 even in non-special-edition versions like the Asus TUF Gaming OC. Prices have jumped 20% in the past month and 41% over six months, putting the card 145% above its original MSRP. Even pricier variants exist, including the Asus ROG Astral RTX 5090 Edition 20 listed at $5,740.
TecLab modified a Galax RTX 5090 D HOF OC LAB XOC by bypassing its 16-pin power connectors entirely, soldering wires straight to the PCB's power traces and replacing the stock cooling with an industrial water cooler. Power meter readings suggested the card was drawing roughly 600W, well within the card's 2,000W custom BIOS limit, though final temperatures were not disclosed. The team clarified the stunt was a sarcastic jab at Nvidia rather than a genuine repair method for regular users.