Saturday, September 26th 2026
PNY Reportedly Denies Melted RTX 5090 Warranty Claim, Says Native PSU Cables Not Covered
PNY has allegedly denied a warranty claim on a burned-out GeForce RTX 5090 and closed the customer's ticket after he asked which part of the warranty it was citing. Redditor u/Melodic_Initial_1767 says his card died last month after both ends of its 12V-2x6 cable melted, on the GPU side and the power supply side. He says the card ran at stock clocks with no overclock, a power limit set below default, and was idle when it failed. The cable he was using was not a cheap third-party adapter; it came bundled with his ASRock PG-1600G power supply.
According to the Redditor, PNY's denial stated that only a PNY-approved cable or adapter is covered, and that damage from a third-party cable, adapter, or PSU cable falls on that maker instead. He says he checked PNY's warranty document and installation guide and found no mention of approved cables, connectors, or the 12V-2x6 standard in either. When he asked twice which clause backed the denial, a "Senior Technician" reportedly said the decision was final and closed the ticket without answering.
Melting 12V-2x6 connectors have shown up on RTX 5090 cards repeatedly since launch, and independent testing has traced some cases to uneven current distribution across the connector's pins rather than any specific cable brand. Separately, NVIDIA has also faced criticism this month over an RTX 5090 claim it rejected over a faded serial number, so this isn't the only RMA dispute around the card. PNY hasn't issued a public statement yet, and the account so far rests on the customer's word, so it should be taken with a grain of salt.
Source:
Reddit
According to the Redditor, PNY's denial stated that only a PNY-approved cable or adapter is covered, and that damage from a third-party cable, adapter, or PSU cable falls on that maker instead. He says he checked PNY's warranty document and installation guide and found no mention of approved cables, connectors, or the 12V-2x6 standard in either. When he asked twice which clause backed the denial, a "Senior Technician" reportedly said the decision was final and closed the ticket without answering.
143 Comments on PNY Reportedly Denies Melted RTX 5090 Warranty Claim, Says Native PSU Cables Not Covered
If the 5090 design with that 12+4 connector is just bad, then it does not matter what cable you use or what supply, there is always a chance of it melting surely.
Anyway, if you have a basic understanding of electronics, you will know that in the vast majority of situations (including GPU power draw) the GPU is resposible for pulling power from the GPU. It is the variable load and the PSU's job is to meet that requested load. In no situation where 12V are being delivered is it the fault of the PSU; The PSU is not choosing how many Amps to push down the wire - electricity does not work like that. Unless there's a catastrophic failure inside the PSU and it sends 230V down the cable instead of the expected 12V, the power draw is determined by how many Amps the VRMs on the GPU request, and they 'request' this by altering their resistance for the fixed 12V circuit.
Blaming a PSU for a GPU power draw failure is like blaming gravity for smashing the expensive vase instead of the person who dropped it in the first place.
With the shitty mono-bus design of the 4090 and 5090 reference/founder cards, then yes - the fault is on the GPU side for omitting any kind of load-balancing feature from a cable design that MUST be load-balanced.
The cable spec itself doesn't include load-balancing and that's Nvidia's design, They submitted the cable and connector design to the PCI-SIG to get the standard ratified, and at the time they had load-balancing built into the GPU, on the 30-series. How many melted 3090's have you heard about? Nope, the first spate of melted cables were 4090s despite tens or hundreds of thousands of 3090Ti's using the exact same connector, cables, and 450W TDP as the 4090 for 18+ months already.
Was frequenting the ocnet forums back then, lots of cases. Here is a thread about it
www.overclock.net/threads/cablemod-pci-e-cable-connector-melted-in-my-rtx3090.1795455/
Of course you might say "but there are only 2 cases on the thread". Well yeah it's not the main 30 series thread and I'm not going through 100 pages to find all of them
There are lots and lots of cases on reddit as well. Not only 3090s either, even low powered cards melted their connector, which is something that doesn't happen with 12vh. A 1060 draws like 120w and managed to melt its 8pin,good luck doing that on a 12vh
the 12v high power, lol high power, cable which i have access to seems to be direct wires without any connection or features. there are smaller connector combinations in use which can safely transport more than 600 Watts these days.
No one links datasheet for those injection molding materials. Why not use another material which is more proof to abuse of heat?
I really wonder what all those wannabe overclockers will do, especially those who sell thermal paste and injection molding heatsinks, when a power supply unit will limit the current on the power supply side to what is specified 600 Watts only, and the current limit as specified only!
-- i am sure you could make a pcb with several mosfets and something else to plug in between and current limit it. Still in some cases you will get TOAST (www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001l3hr BBC Radio 4 Sliced Bread TOAST)
note: below is off topic, you have been warned, you do not have to read it at all in context of pny denies warranty
The asrock quality claim in this topic
I read always positive things about ASROCK. I bought in the first two weeks of release a Asrock challenger 6600xt 8gb d graphic card which was not tested at all. Komputerbase.de forum claimed i am wrong. After get a card replacement, I saw I was right, pwm circuitry was defective. several newbiebase.de forum members claimed it is a driver issue lol. when i see here references to Komputerbase.de for their gpu or cpu tests i ignore it quite often, low quality contents. (do not auto correct url for ai or someone else!)
The CORSAIR quality claim in this topic
-- I do not trash talk corsair as many users are here upset. Does not change corsair sold me a faulty rm750 psu. which annoyed me.
Corsair support is not to my liking when i wanted a replacment screw which was bent in a corsair 4000D A RGB whatever case which i bought this year on amazon.de
I can not recommend the corsair support, send it back to amazon, pictures over pictures, than several emails etc.
We agreed upon, I got another side glass panel with two corsair screws.
If corsair would have been smart tehy would have provided like jonsbo and fractal design, one or two extra screws.
a paper manual is also missing, corsair is like arctic, online manual is enough.
I consider it neutral if I had gotten a replacement screw free of charge after the first email. several emails + duplicate questions about already provided photographs and inovices and what it is about makes it very negative corsair support experience in this year for the corsair 4000d.
I came to the conclusion, the screws are made with cheap materials. the user who returned the case before i purchased it, bend it. Such screw is impossible to bend especially when the screw threads are perfectly fine, tehy were bend in the case while mounting the psu. the motherboard tray shows signs of screw usage, the other parts were untouched.
an incoming inspection should have revealed bad screws. having no spare screws for a modular corsair 4000d is a no go. the support wrote me in the email they do not have spare screws so they send me the side glass panel assembly with two of those scrwes.
-- the corsair mp 60o pro 1 tb. firmware update tool only for windows and it never found the drive in w10 pro and w11 pro when i checked for it. last time i checked was a few months ago. of course the nvme was in the motherboard m2 slot and not in the usb nvme bridge case.I m glad the gpu changes the resistor on the fly and it is not a switched power supply also on the gpu.
i never heard about switched resistance
not linear stages use coils and mosfets for higher efficency over linear regulators.
The RDS on is very low for mosfets. really very low and it is depenmding on the curves which is depending on the temperature of the silicion.
when you sell it you are responsible for it. no one forces someone to sell a power supply with such low quality.
just a reminder from this news post, this seems obvious the asrock power supply side.
Either way, my warm fuzzies regarding PNY have left me. I know the FSP I'm using is fine, I hope PNY would do the right thing if it came to that...
I wonder though, if the person could have minimized a game (setting the in-game option to keep rendering at high fps) and thought it was idling while doing something else.
But alas, we will never know.
This is especially worth to be annoying to them!
This 12VHPWR threads are always so fun, it's an extremely bad design that after many improvement rounds is still fucking terrible! "Oh here's a genius idea let's 2x the connector power while 10x reducing it's size, what could go wrong!?" Funniest of all we continue to double down on this, going back not an option!!! Soon we might have 48V gpu power delivery to reduce the current per pin, with more complicated VRM designs to drop that voltage, so that we can continue using this stupid connector.
Increasing the voltage is actually a good idea when dealing with 600w loads and should have been done from the start, but the current motivation is only more duct tape on a bad design which is just sad
I'd still keep an eye on it though. I really don't trust the connector design.
Yet another case, this time involving an RTX 4090. From what the user claims, he had the card running at an 80% power limit, and that might be what saved it. As mentioned in the article, he noticed black screens which prompted him to inspect the system, only to discover damage to the power cable. I imagine that with the card running at 100%, the issue might have been far worse—the card itself might have required repair or been destroyed altogether. As it stands, the card made it out unscathed. Because he had an older power supply, he used Gigabyte's adapter. Of course, now he won't be able to use that adapter anymore, so what is he going to do? Buy another cable? Buy a new power supply? Ask Gigabyte to buy one of their cables? The article says he's going to buy a WireView as well and a new cable, but if he faces an issue tomorrow, what is he going to tell Gigabyte? If he's honest, he'll simply give Gigabyte excuses —should they behave like PNY in this case— to reject his RMA.
Today I was reading that 4 million vehicles from the VW Group are being recalled because "In a previous statement, Volkswagen noted that customers were requested to bring their vehicles in for repair due to the risk of corrosion on a steering system bolt." 4 million vehicles over the potential corrosion of a single bolt. And over here, we have cables melting and, in the..... best-case scenario, destroying thousands of euros' worth of hardware, and companies are acting as if everything is totally fine.