It's not just the GeForce RTX 5090... we've now got melting connectors on the RTX 5080

NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition graphics card was inside of a Redditor's PC, with another melted 16-pin power connector joining the issues of the RTX 5090 FE and its melted power connectors from a couple of days ago.

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This seems to be the first reported GeForce RTX 5080 graphics card having a melted power connector, with Redditor r/Ambitious_Ladder1320 posting on the ASUS subreddit that he had a similar melted power connector issue with his new RTX 5080 Founders Edition powered by the ASUS ROG Loki PSU.

He said that the GPU had a flashing red light, which is an indicator of incorrect seating of a pin on his connector, noting that he did connect the connectors properly, trying again after turning off his PC. The same error didn't reappear, but his monitor resolution and refresh rate were massively downgraded, with his RTX 5080 FE running in PCIe 3.0 x3 mode, which is totally wrong.

• Read more: GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition: first melted power connector, third-party cable blamed

After re-plugging in all of the cables, the Redditor noticed a melted 16-pin power connector on the PSU side of things, with his elusive new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition graphics card not being affected.

The user noted that there have been 3 similar incidents with users running the ASUS ROG Loki PSU, but it wasn't known which users were actually using the 12VHPWR power connector, or if they were also using NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 5090 or GeForce RTX 5080 graphics cards.

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ASUS is unfortunately in trouble here, as its ROG Loki PSUs have been involved in both RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 graphics cards going through melted power connectors, and with discussions of the 12VHPWR design and wire quality, it looks like these issues aren't going to go away. Both ends of the cable seem to be overheating with nearly zero headroom for supporting higher power flowing through the cables.

There seems to be no issues running the 12V-2x6 power connector, which is the upgraded version of the 16-pin power connector that you should be using with the new GeForce RTX 50 series GPUs, especially the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 graphics cards.