NVIDIA RTX 5070 cards with burnt out 12VHPWR aren’t as common as cases of RTX 5090 GPUs suffering the dreaded fate, but it’s clear that not even the mid-range Blackwell GPU is safe from the potential fire hazard. One user posted their friend’s unfortunate situation on Reddit.
The Redditor, Gatlyng, only posted a picture of the melted 12VHPWR, allegedly belonging to an RTX 5070 of a friend of theirs, who complained that they began experiencing random black screens, followed by reboots. To be fair, the Redditor says that his friend may not have fully plugged the cable in. In which case, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that that was the cause of it. That said, the card is still less of a power-hungry component compared to the RTX 5090, drawing 250W of power, far less than the 600W power consumption of the top-tier Blackwell GPU. As a reminder, a 12VHPWR connector that isn’t fully seated or connected to the card or PSU runs the risk of creating poor electrical contact, which in turn increases resistance and generates enough heat to damage the connector or worse, burn down a system and the house along with it. That being said, even the most cautious efforts to ensure this never occurs don’t always work.
This isn’t the first case that an RTX 5070 has been reported as a victim of a meltdown, although that incident feels more self-inflicted and, dare we say it, deserved on “what even were you thinking?” grounds. Months ago, a Russian TechTuber by the name VIK-off (or VIK-on, depending on how you translate it) posted a video of a “genius” who thought it would be a good idea to split a single 8-pin PCIE power connector into two, with the dual ends connected to the provided 12VHPWR adapter. If you haven’t already read this, we’ll give you the summary: extremely stupid and bad idea.
Then as now, we’ll go through this in broad strokes: one 8-pin PCIe connector is capable of running up to 150W of power, with a dual 8-pin PCIe connector handling double that, and directly from the PSU. The 12VHPWR Gen 5 connector, which was first introduced with the launch of the NVIDIA RTX 40 Series GPU in 2022, is designed to handle up to 600W in a single throughput, significantly more than the standard 8-pin. The RTX 5070 itself requires up to 250W TGP, with a recommended 650W PSU for good measure.
(Source: Reddit, Videocardz)
