Nvidia RTX 5090 owner reports MSI’s yellow-tipped 12V-2×6 power cable melted despite foolproof design

What just happened? It seems a supposedly foolproof solution to the problem of melting graphics card cable connectors isn’t infallible. A user of MSI’s yellow-tipped 12V-2×6 power cable has reported that despite being designed specifically to avoid the melting issues affecting high-end Nvidia graphics cards, the cable connector has burned black.

MSI was the first company to ship PSU/graphics card 12V-2×6 power leads with plastic housing molded in a bright color. The concept behind them is that users push the connectors far enough into the cards so that no color remains visible. This ensures the connectors are fully seated and not in danger of overheating.

Did you know?🧐 MSI graphics cards come with a special dual-color 16-pin PCIe cable!
If you see yellow, your connection isn’t secure😮 Make sure to connect it properly, and game on with confidence!

*This dual-color design applies only to the 1-to-3 and 1-to-4 dongles. pic.twitter.com/KuKWbej3df

– MSI Gaming (@msigaming) April 1, 2025

It’s also worth remembering that the 12V-2×6 cables feature shortened sense pins, so the pins don’t touch until the connector is fully seated.

But it seems even with all these preventative measures, there are still some instances of melting connectors. As posted on the QuasarZone BBS thread (via Harukaze), an owner of the expensive MSI GeForce RTX 5090 SUPRIM SOC was using the bundled yellow-tipped cable and found that the card-end connector had burned and appears to have slightly melted.

The post notes that the card was powered by a Super Flower 1300W ATX 3.1-compliant PSU at the time, so a lack of power wasn’t an issue.

According to the user, a blue screen of death kept appearing and the PC repeatedly turned itself off. It was discovered upon inspection that the GPU-end of the cable’s connector had been damaged.

The poster added that they had played Black Desert, using about 400W, for around two hours.

Just because the tips of the cables are colored yellow doesn’t automatically mean that they’re not going to melt – it’s still down to users to ensure they are properly seated with no color left showing. There’s always the chance that the person in this case made an error. The good news is that the $3,150 RTX 5090 appears to have come away unscathed.

There have been a worrying number of instances in which RTX 4090 and RTX 5000-series power cable connectors have melted – sometimes the cables themselves and the cards or PSUs have been damaged.