No matter what you do, the notorious 16-pin power connector won't be safe. This user was another victim of connector melting, but he tried to mitigate it beforehand.
User Reports Burnt 16-pin Power Connector on GIGABYTE RTX 5090 Despite Restricting it to Consume No More Than 500W
The amount of effort users have to put in just to keep their GPUs safe from connector melting now feel unsettling. It was never like this with the regular 6-pin or 8-pin PCIe connectors, but the notorious 16-pin connector cannot just run without running into issues, despite numerous mitigation attempts by some manufacturers and users.
At this point, it feels as if one should just buy a Wireview II Pro to keep the GPUs safe, but it should never have been the case in the first place. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 remains the number one victim of the connector burning in the RTX 50 series, and users are now trying various methods to mitigate the possibility of the connector melting. A user on Mobil01 forums reported a connector melting on his GIGABYTE RTX 5090 AORUS Master ICE.
The connector melting here doesn't feel any surprise, but it was surely painful for the user as he tried to mitigate the risks by lowering the maximum power his GPU can pull. He set the power limit to 500W, which traditionally is around 600W for most RTX 5090 GPUs. With a 100W lower power limit than his GPU could pull, he thought he was safe, but he soon found out that it was all in vain.
His entire top row of the 12V-2x6 connector burned and melted, as you can see in the pics, while the bottom row is unaffected. This indicates that the entire load was distributed on the top pins, which could have been due to improper contact. As we can see from another pic, he used the three 8-pin to 12V-2x6 connector adapter that came with the GIGABYTE GPU. Such a setup has hardly survived, and in this case, the user was lucky to have his GPU run safely for nearly 7 months.
Nonetheless, his expensive GPU just died despite lowering the power limit, but we have seen RTX 5080, RTX 5070 Ti, and even some Radeon RX 9070 XT GPUs with 12V-2x6 connectors dying due to connector melting, despite having a lower power limit. So, even if he had set the power limit even lower, there was no guarantee that his GPU could have survived. It's simply luck at this point, and one should try to follow all the manufacturer's guidelines to prevent such incidents.
Crucial Tips to Keep Your GPU Safe:
- Ensure you have an ATX 3.1-compliant power supply
- Always use the 12V-2x6 connector cable that ships with your PSU
- Never use an 8-pin to 16-pin adapter
- Ensure the connector is fully in
- Don't have any bends within 35mm of the connection
- Utilize Wireview II Pro for monitoring if possible
News Source: @unikoshardware
About the author: Sarfraz Khan is a hardware reporter with a focus on PC components and the builder community. With years of experience writing about PC hardware and laptops, his work has been featured on several reputable technology publications. Sarfraz's hands-on experience is demonstrated through his first-person accounts of using and comparing different hardware configurations, providing practical and relatable insights for everyday users. His technical analysis is respected by peers in the enthusiast community and has been cited by specialized hardware sites such as Germany's Igor's Lab.
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