An NVIDIA RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell has become the latest victim of the dreaded 12VHPWR meltdown. The good news is that the GPU reportedly survived. The PSU it was connected to didn’t, but perhaps even worse — for the brand, at least — it was an ASRock-branded PSU.
Redditor ScientiaEtRatio91, who seems to be a PC repair technician, posted about their customer’s plight on the PC Master Race subreddit. The story goes that a customer sent in their system with an RTX Pro 6000 GPU after they obviously encountered issues with it.
Upon disassembling the system, the technician discovered that one end of the 12VHPWR cable had failed catastrophically and melted in the PSU socket. The sort of good news is the GPU survived because the end that melted was the one connected to the PSU. Also, both ends of the 12VHPWR cable were fully seated when the meltdown occurred.
It perhaps doesn’t help that the PSU was an ASRock Taichi TC-1650T, which is a 1650W PSU. Now, it’s an unwritten rule that DIY PC builders tend to stick to a handful of brands when it comes to components like a power supply. ASRock isn’t typically one of those brands that one gravitates to for PSUs, even more so with the history of its motherboards killing off AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPUs.
Of course, this is clearly a “correlation does not equal causation” scenario, but the point we’re trying to get across here is that ASRock doesn’t exactly have a great track record right now with its products right now. Its PSU is equipped with a TempGuard feature and an NTC temperature sensor that is supposed to shut down a system when it detects an unsafe temperature. This clearly didn’t.
Videocardz also says that this supposedly wasn’t the first time an RTX Pro 6000 GPU and the same ASRock PSU suffered a catastrophic failure. Back in March, the melted 12VHPWR was on the GPU end, but again, the card was fine and deemed to remain functional, and ASRock reportedly replaced the damaged cable.
Truly Space Age Engineering from Asrock
byu/ScientiaEtRatio91 inpcmasterrace
All in all, the owner was lucky they weren’t stuck with a massive repair bill. For context, the RTX Pro 6000 retails for RM82,999 on average.
(Source: Reddit, Videocardz)
