You can never really rest easy with the 12V-2×6, because no matter whether it’s mounted on an AMD or NVIDIA card, it burns out. We’ve already had reports of the connector burning out on an ASRock RX 9070 XT Taichi, but now it’s happening on a Sapphire RX 9070 XT Nitro. Even though this is a top-of-the-range card, nothing can be done about it.
RX 9070 XT Nitro: another burnt-out 12V-2×6!
And now the Sapphire has also fallen victim to this cursed connector, as e92justin on Reddit posts a photo of his misadventure with this cable. In his shot, you can see the blue connector with four of the six power pins showing burn marks. And we all know what that means: poor load distribution, overheating and burning. Clearly, this is not due to a bad contact, as he indicates that he has connected his cable correctly. As for the power supply, we have a solid block: a Corsair RM1000x, more than sufficient to power the 360W that the card consumes.
In these conditions, all that’s left for him to do is to make an SAV return request, which should normally be granted, given that he seems to have done everything by the book. But we also know that some brands will go out of their way to refuse support.
Finally, this connectivity really doesn’t spare any card… Even a rare RTX 3060 Ti, which consumes no power at all, has seen its connector melt. This shows that cable melting is not linked to the GPU‘s power consumption, but rather to the design itself, which lacks protection and monitoring mechanisms, as Der8auer pointed out in his video investigating the case of Ivan6953’s RTX 5090.
In short, either we need to go back to basics: 8-pin PCIe, or introduce a serious overhaul of connectivity, because that’s no longer possible…