The unlucky Reddit user, posting as u/Deja_, said both cards were powered by a Corsair SF1000 PSU using MSI’s yellow-tipped adapter rather than the native 16-pin cable supplied with the power supply.

The first GPU reportedly cooked itself in July and was replaced through RMA in August, only for the replacement to meet the same melty fate weeks later.

The incident mirrors countless reports of scorched connectors on Nvidia’s RTX 50-series, echoing the early troubles seen on the RTX 4090.

The culprit appears to be the same fragile 16-pin design, which is prone to overheating if not seated absolutely perfectly. Even when users swear the plug is properly inserted, uneven current distribution through the 4x8-pin-to-16-pin adapter can still lead to trouble.

A similar case was flagged by u/jamyjet, who also saw a connector burn out under similar conditions. The adapter’s poor load balancing and flimsy construction remain the prime suspects, though some users point to power supplies and cable strain as contributing factors.

While some failures can be traced to user error, the frequency of melted 16-pin connectors on Nvidia’s top-end cards suggests a deeper design flaw that still has not been sorted.

The Reddit thread, aptly titled “Update 5090 melted again,” has plenty of users vowing to steer clear of adapters altogether, or even to downgrade to an RTX 5080 before their connectors follow suit.