Another user has reported a burnt 16-pin power connector on a Gigabyte RTX 5090 AORUS Master ICE, despite restricting the card to pull no more than 500W.
The amount of nonsense users now have to do to keep a graphics card from cooking its own plug is getting grim. It was never like this with the old six-pin and eight-pin PCIe connectors, but the 12V-2×6 setup seems determined to keep making headlines.
The RTX 5090 is shaping up as the main victim in the RTX 50 series, so owners are trying every mitigation trick going, including power limiting and obsessive cable checks.
In this case, the user set the power limit to 500W, with many RTX 5090 boards typically sitting around 600W. Knocking 100W off sounded like a sensible safety margin, until it was not.
Photos posted on Mobile01 show the entire top row of the 12V-2×6 connector burnt and melted, while the bottom row looks fine. That points to the load ending up on the top pins, which is what you see when contact is poor, and the connector becomes a tiny space heater.
The user was using the three eight-pin to 12V-2×6 adapter that shipped with the Gigabyte card. They were, by sheer luck, able to run the card for nearly seven months before the connector failure, and the GPU died anyway.
It is not just the RTX 5090 either. There have been reports of RTX 5080, RTX 5070 Ti and even some Radeon RX 9070 XT boards with 12V-2×6 connectors suffering similar melting failures, despite running at lower power.
At this point, it feels like luck, following every manufacturer’s guideline, and hoping your expensive GPU does not decide to become a toaster.
