A concerning incident has just surfaced involving a Sapphire Nitro+ AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics card, where its power cable reportedly burned. This troubling event indicates that the issue of melting power connectors isn’t solely confined to high-performance Nvidia GPUs like the GeForce RTX 5090. A key commonality between this AMD card and other affected Nvidia units is their power interface: both utilize the 16-pin 12VHPWR socket, a departure from the more traditional 6/8-pin connectors typically found on most AMD graphics cards.
The AMD 9070 XT is a top contender in the graphics card market, celebrated for its superb performance and generous 16GB of VRAM. While many GPUs built around this AMD technology feature standard 8-pin power sockets, there are crucial exceptions. This Sapphire card is one, and another is the ASRock Taichi card, which also experienced a power socket melting incident during our testing of the Radeon RX 9070 XT.
Evidence of the melted power cable, connected to the Sapphire card, was prominently displayed in a Reddit post on r/radeon. The image clearly shows four of the connector pins charred, surrounded by melted, darkened plastic. The card’s owner, known as e92justin on Reddit, stated that he used the 3x 8-pin adapter provided with the graphics card and powered it with a Corsair RM1000X PSU, having used the setup for only a month.
“I never imagined this would happen to me,” e92justin commented, noting that “these cards don’t pull as much power as the 5090s”… and that “everything was fully seated.” While the 9070 XT generally consumes less power than the 5090, our own tests revealed a surprisingly high power draw from the wall when the ASRock Taichi 9070 XT was running at its overclocked settings.
In that specific configuration, the total system power consumption with the overclocked 9070 XT card was actually 1W higher than with an RTX 4090. However, it still remained a considerable 157W below the peak power figure recorded for the RTX 5090.
Despite the varying power draws, a graphics card’s power cable should never melt. This incident unequivocally highlights a potential risk: any graphics card utilizing a 12VHPWR socket could be susceptible to its power connector melting, regardless of whether the GPU is from AMD or Nvidia.