As it turns out,flashing an alternative BIOS onto an RTX 5090 and performing a shunt mode carries risks. Indeed, user Vinz’s RTX 5090 Astral saw its connector melt. He pushed his card a little too hard, ignored the temperature alerts from his WireView connector, and poof, the connector melted.
He melted the connector on his RTX 5090 Astral after performing a shunt mod and flashing the vBIOS!
In order to get the most performance out of his RTX 5090, Vinz flashed an alternative vBIOS onto his card. He used the one from MSI’s RTX 5090 Lightning Z, which has a more permissive power limit. However, there is a world of difference between the Astral and the Lightning Z in terms of PCB design. The latter has a printed circuit board with 40 power phases and a dual 12V-2×6 power connector that allows for better load distribution… something the Astral does not have. With this, he performed a shunt mod on his card to bypass any protection mechanisms while allowing the GPU to consume even more watts.
But things didn’t go as planned, as the connector started to overheat. Remember that a 12V-2×6 is designed to support up to 600W of power. The user then chose to ignore the high temperature alerts issued by the WireView connected to the card. One thing led to another, and by bypassing the protections and ignoring the alerts, the power cable connected to the WireView melted.
However, he got off fairly lightly, as the graphics card was not affected. Furthermore, the power supply, a Corsair AX1600i, remained intact. In the end, he only had to replace his WireView and power cable before restarting his configuration. It was more of a scare than anything else.
