The Infamous 12V-2×6 Connector Claims Another Victim, RTX 5090 & PSU Connectors Burnt

Another GPU has been added to the (possibly) long list of victims of the problematic 12V-2×6 connector, as Reddit user Roachard posted their MSI RTX 5090 GAMING TRIO card with visible damage on the 12-pin receptacle. As the user explains, this incident involves no third-party cables, nor any user errors, and not even any overclocks for that matter.

12V-2×6’s Problems Persist

The user’s setup is fairly typical as far as a high-end gaming PC is concerned, with an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D paired with the aforementioned MSI GPU, along with Corsair’s SF1000L power supply – which is a SFX unit with smaller footprint, but aside from slightly less capable cooling capabilities with this kind of form factor, it should function just about the same as a regular ATX equivalent as far as power delivery is concerned.

“I saw the melting cables posts and thought that I was safe if I stayed away from custom cables. Apparently its still not safe to use the original manufacturer’s cables,” the user said in the Reddit post. But the damage didn’t stop at the GPU – even the power supply suffered damages caused by the connector. According to the user, the bulge on the PSU connector is “melted plastic and what looks to be a cable that is burnt white.”

Based on the images, it looks like the connector may have suffered from unbalanced load, with one burnt pin suggesting all the power was sent to this cable, and the lack of shunt resistors in RTX 50 cards in general means there’s no way for the card to know if the cable is misbehaving, thus causing the connector to melt due to high temperatures. (Only the ASUS ROG Astral cards feature pin monitoring to alert users if the load exceeds safety margins.)

As HardwareLuxx editor Andreas Schilling said, the 12V-2×6 connector “will forever remain a weak point” for this generation of NVIDIA GPUs – despite Team Green’s efforts of fixing the connector with the new version iterated from the original 12VHPWR standard, cases of melting connectors continue to emerge. Expect more cases to be reported down the line as there has been five confirmed cases in just two months, according to this Reddit thread.

Pokdepinion: Another one unfortunately bites the dust.