Another melted Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 power cable has appeared online, and this time it was a 12VHPWR cable specifically designed to stop it from being connected incorrectly. MSI started including a two-color adapter cable with its RTX 5000 GPUs a few months ago, so the bright yellow would clearly show up if the plug wasn’t firmly embedded in its socket. However, one of these cables now appears to have burned out after being plugged into an RTX 5090 graphics card.
If you have the money, and you can actually find 5090 stock, the latest Nvidia flagship is undoubtedly the best graphics card you can buy right now. However, we’ve seen a number of reports about power cables melting since the launch, which Nvidia had previously claimed wouldn’t be an issue with the new GPU.
This melted MSI cable appears in a post on Korean tech forum Quasar Zone, and it shows that one row of pins on the 16-pin 12VHPWR plug has clearly been blackened and burned out after being plugged into an MSI Suprim RTX 5090 graphics card.
The cable’s user, Mr. Aki, claims to have plugged the black and yellow MSI extension cable into the 8-pin connectors on a 1,300W Superflower PSU, and states that he used the cables that came with the power supply.
The user also shows the corresponding socket on his MSI Suprim graphics card, which again shows blackened pins in the top row, although none of the plastic socket housing has visibly melted. As I found in my RTX 5090 review, this new GPU consumes a significant amount of power, with Nvidia rating it at 575W – that’s a massive amount of power for a single power connector to handle.
While the connector is up to the job in the vast majority of cases, alarm bells have been rung about the current drawn by the cable on occasions. Renowned PC tech expert Roman ‘der8auer’ Hartung showed that just one conductor in such a cable drawing 20A in his tests, with the Nvidia cable temperature hitting 153°C at the PSU socket end.
MSI had hoped to limit these scenarios by making it hard to insecurely connect the power cable to the GPU, as you’d be able to clearly see the yellow on the new plug, but it doesn’t look as though that was enough in this instance. It’s not yet known whether the blackened power plug is the result of being incorrectly plugged into the graphics card yet.
If you are thinking of upgrading your graphics card, check out my full guide on how to install a GPU first, and triple-check that your power connector is well and truly clicked into its socket before you switch on your PC.
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