Nvidia has confirmed that it believes the melting power cable problem that beset its RTX 4090 cards won’t reoccur with the RTX 5090 cable. That’s despite the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 consuming 125W more power than the RTX 4090.
Nvidia made the claim in a recent Q&A session at an editor’s day in South Korea. With users set to fork out $2,000 for the new best graphics card in its class, one journalist asked the company directly if the melting cable issue should be a concern for potential buyers.
In reply to the question, an Nvidia spokesperson stated (machine translated): “We do not expect such a phenomenon to occur with the RTX 50 series.” He goes on to say: “We made some changes to the connector to respond to the [melting RTX 4090 cable] issue at the time, and now, about two years later, we understand that the problem has not occurred.”
The changes to which Nvidia is referring occurred in mid 2023 when the company switched the connector on its top-end cards from the original 12VHPWR connector to a 12V-2×6 connector. The new design slightly offset some of the signal cables so they would only connect and enable the card to function when the crucial high-current cables were properly seated.
The new connector did indeed seem to largely solve the issue, as most of the problems with the cards seemed to stem from users not fully inserting the cables, thus leaving too weak a connection for the huge amounts of current being pulled through the cables. The small contact area creates a higher resistance than normal, which results in more heat being generated by the contact. With the new connector, this ability to have a poor connection was largely resolved.
That said, for many months after the new connector was issued, repair shops reported still getting a steady stream of melted RTX 4090 cards. That’s why it’s still a concern for buyers and why there are industry-wide efforts to help users, with innovations such as MSI’s yellow cable connectors that in theory make it easy to see if your cable isn’t properly seated.
For more on why you might want to consider buying this 575W monster of a GPU, check out our Nvidia RTX 5090 review, including a test of its power consumption, as well as gaming performance with and without DLSS 4 frame generation.