Another month, another melted 12VHPWR adapter on an RTX 5090 and more specifically, an MSI RTX 5090. In this most recent tale of burnt-out adapter, the head didn’t just fizzle: it fused together with the power port of the GPU.
The post of the affected MSI RTX 5090 was first posted on Reddit by Redditor Unhappy-War6154, over on the pcmasterrace subreddit. They even provided the spec sheet of their system: an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D, MSI Tomahawk X870, the card coming from the Gaming Trio OC lineup, and a Seasonic TX-1600 Noctua Edition PSU.
MSI 5090 adapter looks… welded to the card (melted?)
byu/Unhappy-War6154 inpcmasterrace
As the story goes, the redditor originally used the stock cables that came with the Seasonic PSU, but was being greeted by black screens under load. From there, they switched over to the MSI stock 4xc PCIe adapter, which seemed to resolve the issue at the time.
But this wasn’t to be a happy ending for the Unhappy-War6154. The next day, when they turned on their PC, their Windows PC stopped detecting the GPU. The monitor would wake up when plugged into the RTX 5090, and confirmed this after they plugged it into the onboard AMD GPU.
Thinking that it was a seating issue with the cable, they powered off the PC to try and unplug it, and it was at this moment that they noticed that the 12VHPWR wouldn’t budge. At all. The head of the cable was fully latched onto the power port, but more to the point, the redditor said that they could see two distinct burn marks on the plastic connecting points.
As implied by both the title and the start of this article, this isn’t the first time that MSI’s yellow-tipped 12VHPWR cables that ship out with their RTX 5090s have come under fire (no pun intended) for causing an electrical fire, to say nothing of other NVIDIA RTX 5090 cards. Uniko’s Hardware pointed out on X that, upon closer inspection, some heads in the MSI adapters tend to use thinner metal on one end of the terminal, which hints towards an inconsistency in the way vendors implement the manufacturing standard of 16-pin cables.
Then, as now, the advice in this case remains the same: it is always better to use the native PSU cable that come with your PSUs, rather than some third-party models. Also, whenever and wherever possible, it is better to avoid adapters, and ensure that the head of your 12VHPWR cable is securely fastened into the port.
(Source: Reddit, Uniko’s Hardware via X, Videocardz)
