Official RTX 4090 power cable found melted by reviewer 2 years later — card functioned fine despite hidden melted connector

DGIX

February 13, 2025

Nvidia’s decision to use the 16-pin (12VHPWR) power connector for its highest-powered GPUs has been popular for all the wrong reasons this week. Reports of melting cables in RTX 5090 GPUs are reaching a fever pitch. Greek PC gaming site Dark Side of Gaming checked its last-gen RTX 4090 power connector for signs of melting and wear and found melted plastic and exposed pins.

Dark Side of Gaming reports that it has used the same RTX 4090 Founder’s Edition card for two years of game testing and benchmarks, leaving its 12VHPWR cable plugged into the card even when disconnected from the test bench. Even with this safe handling practice, the connector has partially melted away the plastic around one of its pins. No photos were provided of the RTX 4090’s cable input, but editor John Papadopoulos reports a melting, which led to breaking off the plastic inside the GPU.

Even after melting, the melted 12VHPWR cable still fully works. Testing it with the RTX 4090 and an RTX 5090 returned stable results, with no crashes or stability issues. While this is a good sign, it also means that more 12VHPWR cables in the wild may have melted than we know, as the meltdown does not always affect performance.

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This incident does not share many details with other melted cables marked as suspect by skeptics. The 12VHPWR cable was the official cable shipped with the RTX 4090, rather than an aftermarket sleeved cable seen in Der8auer’s testing this week (though the official Nvidia cable has been cause for suspicion for years). The power supply used on the test bench is Corsair’s HX1200 1200W 80 Plus Platinum, not one that has been correlationally linked to melted cables.

Perhaps most importantly, Dark Side of Gaming claims the connection from cable to GPU was rock solid, well-secured, and never removed during its two-year testing life. While the design of the 12VHPWR cable is not the easiest to fully seat, we have no reason to doubt a well-tenured hardware reviewer. If true, this would counter common wisdom that cable melting primarily comes from improper seating.

This latest cable melting evidence should not surprise, as the 12VHPWR has been maligned since the RTX 40-series (Ada Lovelace) GPUs. Pin 1 on the cable has a bad habit of melting, and even though the revised “melt-proof” 12V-2×6 cable revision has been holding stronger, some add-in boards for the RTX 40- and 50-series continue to roll off assembly lines with the older 12VHPWR connector, continuing to introduce a melting hazard.

As this melting did not cause any performance degradation, it would be good practice to check the power connections on RTX 4090s in the wild for similar disfiguration. While the 12VHPWR has not yet entered the realm of fire hazard folk legend like the notorious Molex-to-SATA adapter, it may not take many more bad incidents like this one to entrench Nvidia and its recent RTX high-end models in the hardware Hall of Shame.

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