Vietnamese repair shop received an RTX 5090 with its 16-pin connector blown clean off

Power-related issues have been a running theme with NVIDIA's RTX 4090 and RTX 5090 cards. Despite newer 16-pin standards that were meant to be safer, repair shops and media outlets have become familiar with these cards ending up on their benches. The latest case out of Vietnam shows some of the worst power-related damage we have seen yet, severe enough to completely destroy a GPU and its VRAM.

The report comes from Vietnamese GPU repair outlet quyle.gpufix, which received two RTX 5090 cards for repair. The first had already been tampered with before arrival, arriving with no power, no GPU detection, and a missing A1 VRAM package. That card was repaired and returned the same day. The second was a different story entirely.

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The second RTX 5090 had its 16-pin connector blown out completely, leaving no physical trace. The burn damage was severe enough to expose the copper layers of the PCB, and the destruction extended to both the GPU die and the VRAM, rendering them dead. Out of two cards, only one made it out.

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The repair shop noted that a simple fuse could have prevented the short from burning through the PCB. It called out the manufacturers for the lack of basic protection on a card costing this much. To make matters worse, the warranty does not cover this, leaving the owner without coverage. Fire and explosion cases are excluded from warranty policies, even when the damage originates from the circuit itself rather than user error.

No information was shared about the power supply, cable type, or whether a native 12V-2x6 cable or adapter was used, so the root cause remains unknown. What is known is that this is one of the most severe examples of RTX 5090 burn damage on record, and with 16-pin connectors set to remain the standard for years to come, it is unlikely to be the last.