Yesterday, I was playing WUCHANG: Fallen Feathers when I noticed a strange smell. I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from, so I decided to open my PC case. That’s when I saw it — the power cable of my NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 was burned, and smoke was coming out of it.

For those unaware, it’s well known how unreliable the 12V-2×6 power cables of the NVIDIA RTX-40 and RTX-50 series are. We’ve seen burned power cables for the RTX-40 series. However, this is the first time I’ve seen something like that on the RTX-50 series GPUs.

Here are some images that show the melted power connector and cable.

Now, since I’m well aware of the power cable issues, I always make sure the power cable is fully seated in the GPU. Not only that, but to avoid any accidents, I use different power cables for each and every GPU I test. For the NVIDIA RTX 4090, we use its official one. For the RTX 5080, we use the one it came with. And for the RTX 5090, we use its own. In fact, I don’t remove the power cable from the RTX 5090 whenever I remove the card from my PC case.

Still don’t believe me? Here’s a picture I took before removing the power cable. You can clearly see that it was fully plugged in. No matter how hard you push it, it can’t go in any further.

One of our readers noticed a “line” or “gap” in this image. That was as much as the cable could go in on our specific RTX 5090 Founder’s Edition. You can also clearly spot this “line” or “gap” at the connector in the video at the 0:12 mark. In the video, we had the RTX 5090 running for over 20 minutes at 100% usage. No burn, no smoke issues. Temps were fine (below 78 Celsius with auto fan), and power draw was correct.

Assuming the cable wasn’t fully seated, the GPU should be smoking in the video, not working perfectly. In other words, you can’t say “I see that line, it wasn’t fully seated” but then say “Well, I see the line in the video and it wasn’t fully seated, but it did not burn and it works fine“. If you can’t 100% replicate what you say, then your assumption is not correct. That’s how things work. That’s why companies always ask you for the steps to reproduce your problem, whether it’s a hardware failure or a software issue.

What’s even funnier here is that the top row of connectors didn’t get damaged at all. See that “gap” at the top in the picture? Yep, those top connectors didn’t burn. If the cable wasn’t fully seated, those would be the connectors that would get melted. Instead, the ones that burned were the bottom ones. And if you look closely, the bottom of the connector actually has more contact than the top.

Again, I’m fully aware of the melted power cable issues of the RTX-40 series. That’s why I always make sure to push the power cable in as firmly as possible. But if you look at the pictures of the burned cable, it seems like the bottom row of connectors wasn’t fully plugged in. Not the top. That’s the only thing that makes sense. So somehow, even though I pushed the cable in really hard, it still came loose. But here’s the weird part — if that’s true, why didn’t the middle connector at the bottom row melt too? It doesn’t make sense.

What’s really strange is that I didn’t experience any crashes or problems while playing. The only reason I found out something was wrong was because of the weird smell. Just to test things out, I removed the RTX 5090, then plugged it back in and ran WUCHANG for 20 minutes while keeping an eye on the GPU. I also recorded a video of the test. Surprisingly, the PC stayed stable, and there was no smoke coming from the power connector. Everything seemed to run fine — at least during that stress test.

The bottom line is this: the RTX-50 series still has problems with burned or melted power cables. And if it happened to me, it could happen to anyone. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I’m the best of the best. I’m not. But I’ve been testing graphics cards for over 15 years. I also knew about the power cable issues with the RTX-40 series. I always made sure the cable was fully plugged in — and it still happened to me!

In case I didn’t make it clear in my previous paragraph, this COULD be a user error. This isn’t a “Ha, gotcha NVIDIA” article. Not at all. We’ve had this GPU for over six months and have used it to benchmark many games. I’m really testing eight different GPUs for each and every game that comes out (I’m not simulating the results). So, it’s possible the cable came loose while removing the GPU from the case. After dozens of tests, this can happen. Still, the fact that it could come loose at all, even after I made sure to press it in firmly, is a bit concerning. It’s also inexcusable for this GPU not to have a safety mechanism for when a cable is not fully seated.

We’ve already informed NVIDIA about this, and they are looking into it. A power cable coming loose by itself on a $2K-3K GPU is unacceptable. What’s worse is that a GPU this expensive doesn’t have a safety system to stop it from pulling power if the cable isn’t fully connected. That shouldn’t be happening. Again, this is a premium GPU we’re talking about. Finally, until we get a replacement, we may not have any benchmarks for the RTX 5090.