this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2026
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82
RTX 5090 power connector melts again as cable reaches nearly 200 degrees Celsius (www.tweaktown.com)
submitted 1 week ago by sanitation@lemmy.today to c/pcmasterrace@lemmy.world
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[–] Buffalox@lemmy.world 25 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

These dirt cheap consumer cards are nowhere near the half million dollar compute cards we can sell as many as we can make to AI data centers.
You get what you pay for.

We are working with numbers in the trillions of dollars now, selling for billions worth of components costing millions.
That RTX 5090 isn't even close to a rounding error to us. So sorry for being a bit sloppy on the quality.

-Huang Jensen

[–] redbrick@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago

I once jacked around and lit up a whole wire. The shit glowed so bright and incinerated the entire length of casing. It was the scariest and wildest thing I've done when I used to build PCs. Nowadays, I think laptops can do 99% of what I need.

[–] IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

There's a whole lot of reasons why I will never even consider buying a 5090, and the power connector is a major one of them.

[–] Alexstarfire@lemmy.world 11 points 6 days ago (3 children)

Everyone talks about the power connector but I haven't been convinced the connector itself is the problem. This article even specifically says that the connector was plugged in all the way. If the hardware and/or firmware doesnt cut off when it detects power problems, that's the actual problem. The connector may expose the issue, but it's not the main problem.

[–] Arda@piefed.social 1 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

There are many examples analyzed by gamers nexus and der8auer and the connector seems to be designed in a way that it simply is hard to properly connect, the bandaid solutions are software monitoring and visual helps

[–] Alexstarfire@lemmy.world 1 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

The connector certainly doesn't help, but if a single point of failure causes this, it's not JUST the connector. Allowing that much power to be able to run through a single pin is problematic. Houses have multiple forms of protection for outlets. This whole setup seems to have none.

[–] Arda@piefed.social 1 points 17 hours ago

Im no electrician but from what I remember it just needs to be slightly off and that causes a big imbalance in the lanes which leads to heat and something melting which only makes it worse, der8auer even sells parts to help with this and monitor the distribution and connection with logs and everything, so really does seem to be the connector and lack of anything checking the power

[–] IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works 10 points 6 days ago (1 children)

The connector is the problem only in the sense that they are trying to push too much power through conductors (and therefore pins) that are too narrow. The actual problem is inherent to the standard, which is why I'll never own a card that uses it.

[–] Alexstarfire@lemmy.world 5 points 6 days ago (1 children)

As far as I can tell, the power is meant to be split among many pins, not a single one. I can't imagine the intent was to pump 22a through a single pin. Other than my dryer, I don't think I have any cable that's meant to handle that.

[–] IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Yeah, but that's the point, they are trying to push too much current. If you want to push 600+ watts through one connector, you shouldn't be doing it at 12v

[–] Alexstarfire@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

But it's supposed to be across like 6 pins or something. That's only 100w a pin. When working properly, there shouldn't be a problem. All these meltdowns seem to happen when something has gone wrong.

[–] IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works 7 points 6 days ago

They split it across 6 pins without mandating any load balancing.

They should have upped the voltage or upped the conductor size. There's no universe where "something going wrong" should immediately result in melted connectors as the first option.

[–] Exec@pawb.social 6 points 6 days ago

Issue is that the cards have no way of telling the state of each input pin. Nvidia mandated the manufacturers to terminate the power input in one giant plane.