An RTX 5090 owner's run-in with PNY's warranty process after a power connector failure has raised eyebrows across the gaming community. User Melodic_Initial_1767 posted the exchange on Reddit, claiming his PNY RTX 5090 died while idle, with both ends of the 12VHPWR cable melted on the card side and the PSU side, leaving the system unable to detect the GPU at all.
According to the owner, the card was connected to an ASRock PG-1600G power supply using the native 12V-2x6 cable that shipped with that PSU, not an external cable or splitter. He also added that the VBIOS was stock, the card had never been overclocked, and the power limit had been set below the default output.
Despite this, PNY rejected the claim the same day it was filed, stating that only PNY-branded cables or adapters are covered under warranty. The company said it doesn't cover damage caused by any third-party cable, adapter, or PSU-supplied cable involving melting, burning, or overheating.
- Read more: Club386 is the latest victim of melted 12V-2x6 cable connectors, RTX 5090 and PSU both damaged
- Read more: Enthusiast attempts to install second 12V-2x6 connector on RTX 5090, is rewarded with a hole punched through the PCB
- Read more: Vietnamese repair shop received an RTX 5090 with its 16-pin connector blown clean off
The owner wasn't willing to take that answer at face value, though, and did his own digging through PNY's documentation. He found no such requirement anywhere in the company's actual warranty policy. PNY's latest GeForce warranty documentation appears to include no details on cables, adapters, connectors, or PSUs at all, only a basic requirement that the card be installed "in accordance with the installation guide provided herewith."
When he checked that installation guide directly, its connector diagrams covered only 6-pin and 8-pin configurations, not the 16-pin cable PNY's support team had cited as the issue. A reply from a senior PNY technician said the denial was final, closing the matter.
PNY's own responses on the subject haven't been entirely consistent, either. In the same Reddit thread, another user surfaced a year-old exchange in which a customer asked PNY support whether a native PSU-supplied 12V-2x6 cable could be used with the graphics card instead of PNY's own adapter, and PNY confirmed at the time that it could.
Around the same time, a separate PNY RTX 5090 owner posted on Reddit about a burned connector on a Digital Storm prebuilt, with the plastic housing melted severely enough to fuse the cable into the card's socket after roughly 15 months of use. These incidents add to the long list of 12V-2x6 connector failures across the RTX 50 series, including a case where Hardware Unboxed measured connector temperatures reaching 175°C because one wire carried far more current than the others.
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For now, it remains unclear whether the gap between PNY's support responses and its written policy reflects an unwritten internal rule or simply inconsistent enforcement. Whatever the explanation, this customer appears to have a reasonable case for coverage based on PNY's published warranty terms, which include no clause addressing the use of a 12VHPWR cable supplied with a PSU. We have yet to see how PNY responds, if at all.
