Gamers already know Nvidia’s power connectors have the survival instincts of a chocolate teapot. The old 12VHPWR standard became infamous for melting, and the flagship Blackwell cards were meant to dodge the curse with the shiny new 12V-2×6 connector. That marketing claim did not age well.

A Redditor has now posted one of the nastiest failures yet. His Windows system suddenly stopped recognising the GPU under a light workload. After popping the side panel, he found burn marks around the adapter on MSI’s RTX 5090.

The incident was so intense that the connector will not budge. He claims it feels fused to the socket and won't move, even with reasonable force. Fellow Redditors advised him not to yank it unless he wanted to take the whole card apart.

This is the second RTX 5090 the user has had trouble with; the first card had suffered from heavy artefacting. Now he is preparing to contact MSI for RMA assistance, although he is not convinced the issue will be covered, since warranties rarely cover “connector welded to card by fire”. The cable in question is MSI’s stock unit, so there are no third-party mods or dodgy adapters to blame.

The broader picture is not encouraging. Although GPU burnouts can sometimes be chalked up to random failure, there are repeated warning signs around power-hungry cards and fragile connector designs. Users are told to check seating, avoid straining cables, and use native 12V-2×6 power supplies. Yet even when they follow every instruction to the letter, cases like this keep cropping up with the RTX 5090.

If Nvidia hoped the new connector would put the melting-GPU jokes to rest, this latest example suggests the saga is far from over.