AMD is reportedly getting ready to raise prices on its Radeon GPU and GDDR6 memory kits again in November. According to a new post from Board Channels, the increase would follow an earlier adjustment in October, when AMD apparently started charging its board partners more for GDDR6 from October 1. The exact scope of the November hike isn't known yet. The main reason seems to be memory, since GDDR6 prices reportedly went up by around 8 to 10% in the third quarter. Board Channels also claims AMD now reviews its kit pricing every quarter to keep up with rising GPU and memory costs. AMD sells its GPUs to add-in board partners bundled with memory, so any increase there usually ends up in the price of the finished card.

This would add to a long list of reported increases this year. A 10% hike on Radeon GPU kits was reported for July, another 10% increase across GPUs, chipsets, and possibly CPUs followed in September, and AMD's suggested Radeon prices in China went up in early October. Retail prices are already moving, too. According to Hardware Unboxed's latest pricing survey, cited by Videocardz, the RX 9060 XT 16 GB costs 17% more than it did in September, while the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT are up 12%. Of course, AMD hasn't officially confirmed any of this. How much the November change affects store prices will depend on board partner pricing and existing inventory, so buyers who were already planning on a Radeon RX 9000 card might want to buy sooner rather than later.

Melting 16-pin connectors keep making headlines, and some RTX 5090 owners have started taking the protection of their expensive cards into their own hands. Reddit user DallasGrave has modified an MSI GeForce RTX 5090 with two extra 8-pin PCIe power inputs that work alongside the card's original 16-pin connector. According to their post on r/pcmasterrace, a small pickup PCB is soldered to the contacts of the 16-pin header, and that board feeds a second PCB carrying the two 8-pin sockets. The card then runs on three cables in total. DallasGrave says each conductor now carries roughly 3 A, and that the wires never crossed 40°C during a 48-hour run at 550 W, even at the joint. More test data is apparently on the way, so for now these are the modder's own numbers.

The 12V-2x6 revision was supposed to fix the melting power connector issues. In early 2025, NVIDIA said the 16-pin melting issues were over, pointing to the updated connector on the RTX 50-series. However, the first melted RTX 5090 Founders Edition was reported shortly after, in that case with a third-party cable. Since then, several RTX 5090 power connectors have reportedly melted, including one with an undervolt and a -100 W power limit. Moreover, last month Hardware Unboxed watched its RTX 5090 power cable reach 175°C with a single wire pulling around 22 A.

Hardware Unboxed and Toasty Bros have both tested the mysterious Radeon RX 9050 4 GB, and the results look rough. AMD only sells this version in OEM systems, so both channels had to buy CyberPowerPC prebuilts to get one. In Hardware Unboxed's 18-game test at 1080p Low, the 4 GB card averaged 78 FPS with 55 FPS 1% lows, against 107 FPS and 78 FPS for the RX 9050 8 GB. That makes the 8 GB model about 37% faster. At the lowest settings tested, it was still around 32% ahead, at 147 FPS versus 111 FPS. Both cards share 1,024 Stream Processors and up to a 2.6 GHz boost clock, so the difference comes from memory. As AMD confirmed, the 4 GB model has a 64-bit bus, 144 GB/s of bandwidth, and 16 MB of Infinity Cache, exactly half of what the 8 GB model has.

Toasty Bros opened their prebuilt and found an XFX dual-fan card with a single 8-pin connector, so it looks like ASRock is not the only partner making one. AMD has said it developed the Radeon RX 9050 4 GB version for a specific partner system aimed at entry-level gaming customers, and that it has no plans to sell it outside that OEM PC. The card was first spotted in a CyberPowerPC Gamer Master prebuilt at Best Buy, which was listed at $889.99. Keep in mind that this is still a small sample, with only two outlets testing the card so far, so it's important to wait for more independent results before drawing firm conclusions. Still, AMD launching a card with only 4 GB of VRAM in 2026 is not looking like a great decision so far.

Hardware Unboxed has become the latest hardware channel to watch a 12V-2×6 connector melt on an RTX 5090 test bench. The setup paired an ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5090 with a be quiet! Dark Power 13 PSU, and host Steve reportedly only caught the fault after touching the cable and finding it hot enough to burn his hand. A thermal camera later confirmed readings above 150°C, climbing to roughly 175°C under load. A Thermal Grizzly WireView Pro caught the underlying problem immediately: a severe current imbalance where some pins carried almost nothing while a single wire was pulling around 22A. Oddly, the damage turned out to be worse on the PSU side rather than at the GPU.

The cable had fused inside the Dark Power 13's connector and needed pliers to remove, while the card's own connector escaped without visible marks. Hardware Unboxed says the cable was fully seated and isn't blaming the incident on installation. This is far from an isolated case, as this connector is notorious for melting. We have reported RTX 5090 connectors melting even after users apply undervolts and power limits, and reported on at least one instance where an ASRock PSU's thermal cutoff saved a card from a similar fate. Some frustrated modders have gone so far as to solder wires directly to the PCB just to sidestep the connector altogether.