There’s a new report about an Nvidia GeForce graphics card causing a power supply cable to melt, but this time it’s not a high-end RTX 4090 or RTX 5090 GPU doing the damage but a much more modest RTX 5070. The RTX 5070 melting cable was reported by a Japanese buyer who documented the damage done by the card and cable combination on their X (formerly Twitter) account.
The user shows pictures and video of an RTX 5070 – which is currently Nvidia‘s best graphics card for those seeking a mid-range card – along with the PC it was installed in, complete with a melted cable. However, while there are still reasons to be somewhat concerned about the ongoing troubles with the 12VHPWR/12V-2×6 standard used by these cards, in this instance the fault largely seems to be from user error or a manufacturing error from the Zotac graphics card.
In the first video posted by X user, ere9w, they show their PC case with the side panel removed and describe how a lot of smoke came out of their PC only two seconds after turning it on. They then zoom in to show the plastic sheathing round one of the individual power supply cable conductors having melted across almost its entire length. They go one to say that they checked the plug’s connection to the card thoroughly and it all seems to be seated correctly.
However, in a follow up video and series of images, ere9w shows the plug of the 12V-2×6 connector, which reveals what appears to be the likely cause of the melting. One of the sense pins – the small pins used to send a signal rather than the thick pins used to send power – in the graphics card cable’s plug appears to be misaligned.
The actual cause hasn’t been verified yet – ere9w reports the card is back with the manufacturer being investigated – but comments on the Twitter thread speculate that this pin could be shorting with one of the 12V power conductors. Regardless, it certainly appears that there is some evidence of physical damage before the melting, which could have occurred at manufacture or when the cable was plugged in. Either way, this slightly pulls the focus away from this being the fault of the cable or the GPU.
Nonetheless, after so many years of bad press for the 12V-2×6 connector, it’s yet another example of how it perhaps isn’t the most robust and user-error-resistant system. That said, reports of issues on lower-power cards such as the RTX 5070 are vanishingly rare and we all still regularly use cards powered by these connectors.
One such card is the RTX 4080 Super that I currently use while even several RX 9070 XT cards have switched to the connector.
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