Another high-end GPU has fallen victim to the 16-pin connector problem, this time involving a $16,000 workstation card and a power supply designed specifically to prevent this from happening.
Reddit user u/ScientiEtRatio91 reported that the 12V-2x6 cable on their ASRock Taichi TC-1650T power supply melted into the PSU's modular socket while powering an NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell workstation GPU. The RTX PRO 6000 is NVIDIA's flagship professional Blackwell card, rated for up to 600W of total board power through a single PCIe CEM5 16-pin connector, putting it in the same power draw territory as the GeForce RTX 5090. The good news, if there is any here, is that the GPU itself survived.
Popular Now: Linus Tech Tips leaks Steam Frame first impressions, and Valve may be working on native Half-Life: Alyx supportThe ASRock Taichi TC-1650T is an ATX 3.1 and PCIe 5.1-compliant 1650W power supply that ships with dual native 12V-2x6 cables equipped with ASRock's TempGuard feature. It uses a built-in NTC temperature sensor to monitor heat and trigger a system shutdown before the connector reaches dangerous temperatures. Both ends of the cable were fully seated, yet the protection still did not activate in time.
One theory as to why this happened points to ASRock's NTC sensor placement, which sits on the GPU end of the cable. In this case, the failure occurred on the PSU side, meaning the sensor was physically too far from the problem to catch it before the damage occurred. For the protection to work reliably, the sensor would need to be present at both ends of the cable.
This isn't the first workstation NVIDIA card to come close to death, either. In a separate incident, an RTX PRO 6000 and the same Taichi TC-1650T had the cable scorch on the GPU side instead. Fortunately, PNY inspected the card and found it was still functional, while ASRock replaced the cable.
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It seems that even the workarounds designed to protect 16-pin connectors are struggling. The ROG Equalizer is another example, which launched as a premium cable solution but has already been photographed with burned pins. While companies are trying to move away from the old 8-pin connectors, Brazilian channel TecLab recently replaced the 16-pin connector on an RTX 5090 with three standard 8-pin connectors and ran the card at 900W for over an hour without any melty cables.
