Leaking Kraken AIO damages RTX 5090 ROG Astral

© Sufficient-Carry6256/PCMR Reddit

A Reddit post details a long-running dispute between an NZXT customer and the company after an NZXT Kraken AIO allegedly leaked onto an ASUS ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090 32GB OC Edition in August 2025. The owner says NZXT acknowledged a manufacturing defect in writing, replaced the cooler, and accepted that the leak damaged both the graphics card and motherboard. Sounds great, but the user isn’t satisfied and now considers lawsuit.

It’s all about the card’s price

Based on the documentation summarized in the post, the central dispute is no longer whether the leak happened, but how the damaged card should be valued. The owner says NZXT initially indicated that salvage retention would be allowed, later changed course, produced conflicting diagnostic conclusions, and attached a 24-hour deadline to a settlement offer the user considered too low. The customer asked for the current replacement cost for the GPU rather than a reimbursement tied to original pricing.

NZXT offers $2855, Source: Reddit

That argument is easier to understand once you look at what happened to ROG Astral pricing. ASUS launch pricing for the air-cooled ROG Astral RTX 5090 OC was $2,799.99, but ASUS later raised that model to $3,359.99 in its own store. In other words, NZXT may have offered the card’s original MSRP, but the market the customer would need to buy into now is far above that.

Blame game

NZXT is obviously not responsible for the inflated RTX 5090 market, and it is not the GPU vendor. Yet the customer also did not create this situation, and the leak itself is described as a confirmed defect in the cooler. That leaves both sides stuck inside a hardware market where “MSRP” and “replacement cost” are no longer even close. Also, many Redditors also pointed out that discussing an active lawsuit in public is usually a bad idea.

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