By Sarfraz Khan
Publication Date: 2026-02-19 18:22:00
No matter what you do, the notorious 16-pin power connector won’t be safe. This user was another victim of connector melting, but he tried to mitigate it beforehand.
User Reports Burnt 16-pin Power Connector on GIGABYTE RTX 5090 Despite Restricting it to Consume No More Than 500W
The amount of effort users have to put in just to keep their GPUs safe from connector melting now feel unsettling. It was never like this with the regular 6-pin or 8-pin PCIe connectors, but the notorious 16-pin connector cannot just run without running into issues, despite numerous mitigation attempts by some manufacturers and users.
At this point, it feels as if one should just buy a Wireview II Pro to keep the GPUs safe, but it should never have been the case in the first place. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 remains the number one victim of the connector burning in the RTX 50 series, and users are now trying various methods to mitigate the possibility of the connector melting. A user on Mobil01 forums reported a connector melting on his GIGABYTE RTX 5090 AORUS Master ICE.
The connector melting here doesn’t feel any surprise, but it was surely painful for the user as he tried to mitigate the risks by lowering the maximum power his GPU can pull. He set the power limit to 500W, which traditionally is around 600W for most RTX 5090 GPUs. With a 100W lower power limit than his GPU could pull, he thought he was safe, but he soon found…
