RTX 5090 couldn’t even handle an old indie game: power connector melted in an hour

Another case of damage to the 16-pin power connector on NVIDIA’s flagship GeForce RTX 5090 has caught the community’s attention. This time, the situation was atypical: a Reddit user with the handle u/UnpluggedUnfettered reported that after about an hour of playing the indie game Crypt of the NecroDancer, his connector didn’t just melt — it suffered damage that’s hard to call ordinary.

According to the owner, he fired up Crypt of the NecroDancer — a game released about 11 years ago that doesn’t make serious demands on a GPU. The user joked that he set the settings to “Ultra,” clearly underestimating the load this game could put on a modern graphics card. After about an hour, he smelled burning and decided to check the state of the power connector. After unplugging the cable, he found that a significant portion of the plastic housing had melted, and a large hole had formed in the top row of contacts, effectively merging two adjacent pins into one.

The main oddity is that incidents like this with the RTX 5090 are usually reported under high GPU load. At full load, this flagship can draw around 600 W, and it’s usually exceeding the rated power combined with poor contact that leads to overheating and a melted connector. However, Crypt of the NecroDancer is unlikely to push the RTX 5090 hard enough to reach peak power consumption. Even so, the damage turned out to be more severe than in typical melting cases, which are usually limited to darkening or deformation of individual sections.

The 16-pin connector (12V-2x6, also known as 12VHPWR in its previous revision) has long been in the spotlight as a potentially problematic component. Back in the RTX 4090 days, reports of melting connectors began to appear, and with the launch of the RTX 5090, the situation hasn’t gone away. Possible causes cited include insufficient contact between pins, uneven current distribution across individual lines, and the lack of proper per-contact load monitoring in graphics card architectures.

As one solution for monitoring and protecting the RTX 5090’s power, the WireView device is often mentioned, while alternatives such as the ASUS ROG Equalizer or ASRock L-Type Connector also exist on the market, but are considered less informative when it comes to monitoring the state of the connection. It’s worth emphasizing that none of these solutions eliminates the connector’s underlying design flaw; they only help reduce risks or react to a problem in time. Until manufacturers offer a systemic change in how flagship graphics cards are powered, incidents like this will likely keep happening.

What do you think — is the problem in the connector design, in users’ behavior, or in something else? Share your opinion in the comments.