The “50” in Nvidia’s RTX 50 series seems to be more fitting than expected, as the GPUs appear to be only half-baked. From numerous reports of defective chips causing performance losses to the infamous power connector issue plaguing the cards once again, RTX 50 series owners have had a lot to think about lately. And now, gamers are facing yet another strange “idle fan” problem with their GPUs.

This comes from Reddit, where user u/ItzXitrA shared an odd problem with their GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition as the GPU fans refuse to stop spinning, no matter what. Even when the GPU is idle with temperatures around 30 degrees Celsius, the fans continue running at 30%. At lower temperatures such as this, cards should stop spinning to save energy and reduce noise levels; many cards wait until around 60 degrees Celsius before activating the fans.

Is Nvidia even aware of these issues?

Nvidia recently released its Nvidia App 11.0.2.337 update, which fans expected would address a bug with game filters causing performance issues when playing games. Instead, Nvidia overlooked that and focused specifically on the DLSS override feature. A similar situation can be seen with the idle fan fix, as Nvidia has yet to confirm this issue, let alone provide a BIOS update to fully mitigate the problem.

More users have commented on the need for an idle fan fix, so it doesn’t seem to be an isolated issue. However, it is pointed out that this is likely something in need of a driver or BIOS update rather than the Nvidia App.

On the bright side, while the RTX 50 series is undoubtedly facing several issues, the green team seems to be doing what they can to fix them. We’ve seen examples of this, such as reintroducing the Priority Access Program to address RTX 5090 and 5080 FE scalping issues or offering replacements for GPUs with missing ROPs. So fingers crossed that Nvidia is paying attention to these issues popping up in gaming communities and will provide a working solution soon.

About the Author

Hassam Nasir

Hassam boasts over seven years of professional experience as a dedicated PC hardware reviewer and writer.