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Nvidia's RTX 5090 power connectors are melting
51–60 of 526 posts
Re: Nvidia's RTX 5090 power connectors are melting
#52This shit is so fucking dumb. Sorry for the unhinged rant, but it's ridiculous how bad every single connector involved with building a PC is in 2025. I'm just a software guy, so maybe some hardware engineer can chime in (and I'd love to find out exactly what I'm missing and why it might be harder than it seems), but why on earth can everything not just be easily accessible and click nicely into place? I'm paying mult…
Connectors are actually extremely difficult to make. - you have to ensure that the metal connectors take shape and bond to the wire properly. This is done by crimping. Look up how much a good crimping tool costs for a rough approximation of how difficult it can be to get this right. - one plastic bit has to mate with another plastic bit, mechanically. This needs to be easy enough for 99.99% of users to do easily, yet…
>> Connectors are actually extremely difficult to make.
While your points listed are valid, we have been making connectors that overcome these points for decades, in some cases approaching the century mark.
>> I'm not surprised at all that they are running into issues here, these cards are pulling 500+ watts. That is a LOT of current.
Nonsense. I used to work at an industrial power generation company. 500W is _nothing_. At 12VDC, that is 41.66A of current. A few, small, well made pins and wires can handle that. It should not be a big deal to overcome that. We have overcome that in cars (which undergo _extreme_ temperature and environmental changes, in mere minutes and hours, daily, for years), space stations (geez), appliances, and thousands of other industrial applications that you do not see (robots, cranes, elevators, equipment in fields and farmlands, equipment in mines, equipment misused by people)... and those systems fail less frequently than Nvidia connectors. But your comment would lead one to think that building a connector with twelve pins on it to handle a whopping (I am joking) 500W (not much, really, I have had connectors in equipment that needed to handle 1,000,000Watts of power, OUTDOORS, IN THE RAIN, and be taken apart and put back together DAILY) is an insurmountable task.
Re: Nvidia's RTX 5090 power connectors are melting
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think next gen we will begin seeing 24V power supplies to deal with this. May as well go the whole hog & jump to 48V. (50V is as high as you can go whilst still being inside the “low voltage” electrical safety regime in most countries IIRC.)
Then the graphics card would have to have a transformer on it to step down to the voltage that the chips can handle.
They already do - most of the components buck the 12V down to the 1.3ish volts that the GPU core needs
Re: Nvidia's RTX 5090 power connectors are melting
#54This shit is so fucking dumb. Sorry for the unhinged rant, but it's ridiculous how bad every single connector involved with building a PC is in 2025. I'm just a software guy, so maybe some hardware engineer can chime in (and I'd love to find out exactly what I'm missing and why it might be harder than it seems), but why on earth can everything not just be easily accessible and click nicely into place? I'm paying mult…
I know we're just ranting, and there are reasons for the seemingly bad designs. But I have a very recent 1200W Corsair (ATX 3.1/PCIe 5.1) which uses these special "type 5" mini connectors on the PSU side. It's painful to try and get your fingers between them to unclip a cable, and yesterday two of the clips broke off just trying to remove them. I ended up taking the whole PSU out just to make sure I didn't lose plastic clips into the PSU itself. It's fine now, but two of my cables will never latch again. Just, blah.
My first build used a Kingwin PSU from around 2007 which used "aircraft style" round connectors which easily plugged in then screwed down. It even had a ring of blue LEDs around the connectors. It was so cool and felt premium! Having that experience to compare to made the Corsair feel cheap despite being so much more powerful.
Re: Nvidia's RTX 5090 power connectors are melting
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then the graphics card would have to have a transformer on it to step down to the voltage that the chips can handle.
They already do - most of the components buck the 12V down to the 1.3ish volts that the GPU core needs
So then it would need to be significantly larger.
Re: Nvidia's RTX 5090 power connectors are melting
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Connectors are actually extremely difficult to make. - you have to ensure that the metal connectors take shape and bond to the wire properly. This is done by crimping. Look up how much a good crimping tool costs for a rough approximation of how difficult it can be to get this right. - one plastic bit has to mate with another plastic bit, mechanically. This needs to be easy enough for 99.99% of users to do easily, yet…
>> Connectors are actually extremely difficult to make. While your points listed are valid, we have been making connectors that overcome these points for decades, in some cases approaching the century mark. >> I'm not surprised at all that they are running into issues here, these cards are pulling 500+ watts. That is a LOT of current. Nonsense. I used to work at an industrial power generation company. 500W is _nothin…
One word: cost.
Look up how much industrial/automotive connectors cost, and you'll see the huge difference in quality.
Re: Nvidia's RTX 5090 power connectors are melting
#57This shit is so fucking dumb. Sorry for the unhinged rant, but it's ridiculous how bad every single connector involved with building a PC is in 2025. I'm just a software guy, so maybe some hardware engineer can chime in (and I'd love to find out exactly what I'm missing and why it might be harder than it seems), but why on earth can everything not just be easily accessible and click nicely into place? I'm paying mult…
> This space feels ripe for a radical re-design.
Making electrical connectors that do their job safely and properly is a solved problem in the engineering world.
Doing so in a way that allows for maximum profit is not.
Re: Nvidia's RTX 5090 power connectors are melting
#58People are letting their hatred of Nvidia blind them to what happened here, a customer upgraded from a 4090FE to 5090FE, they were using a 3rd party ASUS 12VHPWR cable and didn't realize the 5090FE actually uses 12V-2x6 not 12VHPWR, while the port is the same the pins are different lengths. End of the day PC power cabling is such a shambles with things that look standard but are not so you should only ever really use…
The cables between 12V-2x6 and 12VHPWR are identical, it's the port that has different pin lengths (shorter sensing pin, longer conductor pins) to allow for better detection of poorly seated cables and better conductivity while loose.
Re: Nvidia's RTX 5090 power connectors are melting
#59People are letting their hatred of Nvidia blind them to what happened here, a customer upgraded from a 4090FE to 5090FE, they were using a 3rd party ASUS 12VHPWR cable and didn't realize the 5090FE actually uses 12V-2x6 not 12VHPWR, while the port is the same the pins are different lengths. End of the day PC power cabling is such a shambles with things that look standard but are not so you should only ever really use…
Building PCs has gone pretty mainstream at this point. Cases where it is easy to melt the thing by plugging it in wrong should be pretty rare.
Re: Nvidia's RTX 5090 power connectors are melting
#60People are letting their hatred of Nvidia blind them to what happened here, a customer upgraded from a 4090FE to 5090FE, they were using a 3rd party ASUS 12VHPWR cable and didn't realize the 5090FE actually uses 12V-2x6 not 12VHPWR, while the port is the same the pins are different lengths. End of the day PC power cabling is such a shambles with things that look standard but are not so you should only ever really use…
At least according to Corsair, there are no changes to the cable, only the PSU/GPU-side connectors:
> Cable: 12V-2x6 = 12VHPWR No difference!
> So what does this mean if you’ve already got hardware for 12VHPWR? Fortunately, existing 12VHPWR cables and adapters will work with the new 12V-2x6 connector as the new changes are only related to the GPU and some PSUs (Our new RMx PSUs for example). The cables you've got already will work fine, so don't worry.
https://www.corsair.com/uk/en/explorer/diy-builder/power-sup...