An owner of a Sapphire Nitro+ AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics card has just reported a burned up power cable, showing that this problem isn’t just limited to high-powered Nvidia graphics cards such as the GeForce RTX 5090. There is one feature this AMD card has in common with similarly fried Nvidia cards, though, and that’s its power connector – it uses a 16-pin 12VHPWR socket, rather than the 6/8-pin sockets usually used by AMD graphics cards.
The AMD 9070 XT currently tops our guide to buying the best graphics card, thanks to its excellent performance and 16GB allocation of VRAM, and many of the cards based on this AMD GPU use standard 8-pin power sockets. There are some notable exceptions, though. One is this Sapphire card, and another is the ASRock Taichi card that we tested for our AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT review, which has also had a melted power socket incident.
The burned power cable that was plugged into this Sapphire card was shown in a post on r/radeon on Reddit, where four of the pins are clearly blackened with melted, browned plastic surrounding them. The Redditor who owned the card, e92justin, claims that he was using the 3x 8-pin adapter that was included with the graphics card to power it, and that it was plugged into a Corsair RM1000X PSU – he says he’d only been using it for one month.
“Never thought it would be me,” e92justin says, since ‘these cards don’t pull as much power as the 5090s’… Everything was fully seated.” While it’s true that the 9070 XT doesn’t pull as much power as the 5090, we found our test rig pulled a surprisingly high amount of power from the mains with the ASRock Taichi 9070 XT card installed in it at its overclocked settings.
With this configuration, the total system power draw was actually 1W higher with the overclocked 9070 XT card installed than with the RTX 4090 fitted, although it was still a good 157W away from the RTX 5090’s peak figure.
Even so, no matter how much power your graphics card draws, it shouldn’t be melting your power cable, and this report demonstrates that there’s a small risk of your graphics card’s power socket melting if it uses a 12VHPWR socket, whether the GPU was made by AMD or Nvidia.
Have you experienced a graphics card melting incident, or are you playing it safe by only using cards with 8-pin power sockets? Let us know your thoughts in our community Discord server.
