For those who came in late, this year has seen several complaints about overcooked 16-pin plugs on the pricey RTX 5090. But now it appears that the same connector design problem might harm mid-range cards.

A new Reddit report claims a Sapphire RX 9070 XT Nitro+ suffered a burnt 16-pin power connector after nearly nine months of use. The user, u/divinethreshold, said the system ran flawlessly until it started crashing to a black screen.

The RX 9070 XT draws far less power than high-end GPUs like the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090, and only a couple of editions ship with a 16-pin connector. One is the ASRock RX 9070 XT Taichi, which reportedly had an incident a few months ago, and the other is Sapphire’s Nitro+.

This is now the third reported case involving the Nitro+ variant, which is not great for a card meant to sit in the sensible part of the market. After trying various fixes, the owner inspected the build and found the cable connector badly burned.

The photo shows the entire top row of the 16-pin connector looking toasted, with visible overheating on multiple pins. That pattern usually corresponds to a poor connection on the bottom row, dumping the load onto the top contacts.

The user said they were running a Corsair AX1200i power supply, which is not ATX 3.0- or 3.1-compliant and does not have a native 16-pin port. They used the three 8-pin to 16-pin adapters that shipped with the GPU, and those adapters have a long track record of being the weak link.

Adapters have failed in earlier RX 9070 XT cases, too, which makes bundling them feel like rolling the dice with your own wallet. The user’s GPU did not show obvious external damage, but it is hard to believe the connector pins walked away completely unscathed.