Melted 16-pin connectors and adapters have been a recurring problem since the standard first appeared, and it doesn’t feel like the problem is going away.
All the RTX 50-series GPUs released so far require the use of a 16-pin 12V-2x6 connector. The graphics cards all come with the necessary 8-pin to 16-pin adapter, for people that don’t have an ATX 3.0 or later power supply with the necessary cable. 12V-2x6 was supposed to fix the problems with melting 16-pin connectors on cards like the RTX 4090, but reports have started to pop up about 5090 cards having meltdowns.
There are some important caveats here, however. First, at least some of the reports come from people using third party 16-pin cables going straight to the PSU. Some of these may still be the older 12VHPWR variant, which was proven to be problematic. Second, the number of reported melting cables—so far—is far lower than what we saw with the RTX 4090. That’s despite the RTX 5090 using up to 575W of power for the reference card, with custom AIB models pushing well into the 600W range.