• A small variety of experiences of RTX 5090 energy cables overheating and melting have been confirmed
• This follows widespread experiences of comparable points with the earlier RTX 4090
• Nonetheless, it is potential that third-party cables could possibly be responsible this time round

Keep in mind ‘cablegate’? Again in late 2022, customers began to report that the ability connectors of their Nvidia RTX 4090 graphics playing cards had been overheating and basically melting into unusable hunks of plastic – and now, in keeping with some consumers, the identical difficulty could possibly be plaguing the newly-released RTX 5090.

Now, I lined the cablegate fiasco when the story was at its peak, and on the time, I used to be prepared to assign at the very least some portion of the blame to Nvidia, because the PCIe Particular Curiosity Group (PCI-SIG) had beforehand printed a report warning of ‘thermal variance’ dangers concerning the 12VHPWR adapter used for the RTX 4090. This time round, although, I’m actually not so certain Nvidia is at fault.

For starters, the problems seem far much less widespread than with the RTX 4090; whereas there have been actually dozens of experiences again in 2022 (which continued properly into 2024), we’ve solely seen two remoted confirmed circumstances of cable-melting with regard to the RTX 5090. The primary got here from a Reddit person, whereas the second was reported by the Spanish YouTube channel Toro Tocho Opinions. Each reported the identical difficulty: the ability cable overheated and melted at each ends, one thing we didn’t see within the majority of RTX 4090 connector failures.

Secondly, the primary of those circumstances was confirmed to have concerned a third-party energy cable from PC-modding provider MODDIY, introducing a brand new potential level of failure. Nvidia has now moved over to the 12V-2×6 connection normal for extra steady energy supply and safer pin connections, and though MODDIY claims its cables help the brand new normal, the Reddit person said that they’d been utilizing this cable for 2 years with an RTX 4090. Backward compatibility with third-party 12VHPWR cables is more likely to proceed to be a difficulty for Nvidia’s GPUs – notably, MODDIY now has a web page on its web site advising consumers with RTX 5000-series GPUs to buy new-for-2025 12V-2×6 cables.

So is there actually an issue?

In different phrases, at the very least one in every of these cable-melting circumstances seems to have been attributable to person error: the 12VHPWR cable that melted, regardless of being bodily suitable with the RTX 5090, was presumably unable to deal with the ability supply happening. Nvidia’s newest flagship GPU is a hungry lady, in any case, with an obscene 575W TDP.

PC modders are gonna mod, after all, however given the recognized points with the previous-gen card’s energy connector, I’d personally be very reluctant to make use of something however the cables provided within the field at this level. A Reddit megathread on the subject has been created to compile further circumstances, and there’s a good quantity of debate within the feedback as as to whether Nvidia is responsible or if customers needs to be taking extra care to keep away from third-party cables – even when they declare to be suitable.

Naturally, I reached out to my contact at Nvidia to ask for a quote, however Crew Inexperienced declined to remark – not even a ‘we’re investigating’, as a substitute pointing me to MODDIY’s web page warning about utilizing older 12VHPWR cables. It appears Nvidia feels extra assured this time round, additional reinforcing the concept the circumstances we’ve seen thus far had been brought about not by the GPUs themselves however somewhat third-party {hardware}.

It’s nonetheless potential that we’re solely originally of a tidal wave of comparable experiences – given the extraordinarily restricted availability of the RTX 5090 at launch, we may be but to see the total extent of the difficulty as solely a small variety of customers have managed to get their palms on the GPU.