I own an NVIDIA RTX 5090 (and no I didn’t spend more than my entire year’s mortgage costs), a graphics card that costs thousands of dollars, and lately I’ve found myself doing something I never thought I’d have to do: periodically pulling the side panel off my PC just to make sure the damned power connector isn’t melting.
That’s where we are with the RTX 5090 right now, and it’s starting to piss me off.
I’ve been building my own PCs for as long as I can remember. Sure, I destroyed a few CPUs along the way. Gotta love forgetting the heatsink on those old AMD Durons, because those things burned up really fast. But I’ve been doing a pretty damn good job ever since. Yet despite all those years of building PCs, I’ve never felt like I needed to worry this much about whether an expensive piece of hardware could damage itself simply because of the power connection being used.
What makes it worse is that PC hardware is more expensive than ever, especially at the high end. An RTX 5090 can cost several thousand dollars, and at the same time we’re seeing reports of melted power connectors, manufacturers...
