Nvidia tested RTX 5090 with four 16-pin connectors but this specific bug may still melt it

Nvidia has had an awful start to its desktop RTX 50 series launch. The company recently shipped an RTX 5080 with a 5090 shroud from its official store indicating the quality control issues alongside supply chain and stocking problems the tech giant is dealing with at the moment.

Speaking of problems and quality control, a wrong product shroud is the least of the company's worries as Nvidia is also facing the heat related to burning and melting power connectors on RTX 5090. For those that have been following the landscape, RTX 40 series, where Nvidia introduced its 16-pin 12VHWPR PCIe power connector for the first time, also had major issues related to it.

Upon investigation, it was mainly established that improper or inadequate insertion of the new 16-pin PCIe plug was leading to the issue. Aside from that, users were also asked to be careful about the degree to which they were bending the connector cables. To prevent such issues, brightly colored 16-pin 12VHPWR plugs and L-shaped connectors were introduced by some vendors.

The major upgrade came in the form of 12V-2x6 standard which managed to stay within specs and not end up burning or melting even when it was not inserted fully or appropriately.

Curiously, Nvidia is using this newer and supposedly safer form factor and despite that, there are reports of malfunctioning RTX 5090 16-pin power connectors as well. The company had previously stated that it did not "expect" to come across such scenarios with the new family of GPUs. However, that is clearly not the case albeit note that the initial reports were registered on third-party cables.

Nvidia also tested the cards fairly rigorously it seems as engineering samples are apparently showing four 16-pin power connectors on RTX 4090 and 5090:

Overclocking guru and YouTuber Der8auer was testing his RTX 5090 when he found that there was a wide variance in the current flowing through the pins, with some of the pins having to handle up to around 20 amperes of current. With such a high current flow and stress, the temperature of the pin naturally shot up to close to 150 Celsius.

However, not every reviewer agreed with this take. Andreas Schilling, senior editor at Hardwareluxx, did not see such a wide range of current flow in their testing:

It is noteworthy that the current flowing through the individual pins of power connector can only be tracked on some of Asus' variants as it is currently only on the RTX 4090 Matrix, 5080 Astral and 5090 Astral (via UNIKO's Hardware on X).