RTX 5090 With 1350 W OC Saved From Melted Connector by ASRock PSU

Reports of melting 12vHPWR and 12v-2×6 connectors on NVIDIA GPUs—as well as a handful of examples from AMD—have become so common that hardware vendors have started building in safeguards against the issue. One such safeguard is a thermal sensor found on some ASRock power supplies, like the Phantom Gaming PG-1300G, which happened to recently save a user the expense and heartbreak of losing a heavily overclocked NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090.

The incident was reported by user motivman on the Overclock.net forums, and according to the account, the MSI Ventus NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 GPU was overclocked to a whopping 1350 W, which is well over the stock 575 W TDP—although it’s not uncommon to exceed rated TDPs during boost scenarios anyway—and it had just completed a benchmark run in 3DMark Port Royal when the PSU triggered a shutdown. The PC would not restart until the cable had cooled down, which is a decent showing for the PSU’s safety feature—at least mostly.

While the PSU and GPU were seemingly saved, the user explains further down in the post thread that the connector on the GPU side was still discolored after the near-meltdown, leading to speculation that ASRock may need to adjust the thermal shutdown threshold to better protect the hardware. They also note that benchmark scores seem to be noticeably lower after the thermal event, with the card no longer able to reach the same 47,800+ Port Royal scores as before.