Fourteen of the 16 WOLED TVs in RTINGS' 18,000-hour accelerated longevity test developed what the outlet calls "edge rot," meaning dead pixels and other damage creeping in along the panel edges. All of these sets use LG Display panels and were released between 2020 and 2023, and the test works out to roughly ten years of typical U.S. viewing. Older WBC panels fared worst, with nine of ten affected and five rated severe, while five of six newer WBE panels also showed it. Only the LG A2 and LG G3 came out clean. Meanwhile, the three QD-OLED TVs in the test, Samsung's S95B and S95C and Sony's A95K, didn't have a single dead pixel. However, RTINGS says three units are too few to call QD-OLED immune.

Unlike burn-in, edge rot doesn't depend on what you watch, so the usual advice of mixing up content won't help. RTINGS suspects contamination during manufacturing or flaws in the encapsulation layer that keeps moisture out, though confirming that would need proper failure analysis. Two staffers also found it on their own LG GX and C1 at home. In a statement to RTINGS, LG said the issue may appear in a very small number of products under prolonged heat, humidity or other harsh conditions, and isn't expected in normal use, which is interesting given that LG Display once argued QD-OLED was more prone to burn-in. RTINGS now rates WOLEDs slightly lower for expected reliability, including newer models as a precaution, though it still considers OLEDs more durable than LCDs. Its next planned test includes 2025 and 2026 models, some with LG's RGB Tandem panels, which should show if it's been fixed.

Reddit user DallasGrave, who recently soldered a dual 8-pin board to an RTX 5090's 16-pin header, is back with a more ambitious take on the same idea. The new "Quad 2x8 Header Conversion" mounts four 8-pin PCIe connectors right on the card, tapping the contact points of the 12V-2x6 header, so the 16-pin connector can either stay in use alongside it or be skipped entirely. Each 8-pin carries three 12 V conductors, which spreads the load over twelve wires instead of six.

According to the modder, current per conductor is "almost perfectly halved" compared to the native connector, landing at roughly 4.1 to 4.4 A per wire at 600 W, with wire temperatures dropping by around 20°C. The sense pins are set for 600 W, and the board has apparently been tested up to 800 W on a shunt-modded card, where the PCB itself reportedly sat at about 45°C. Videos covering installation, live current data, and a 24-hour sustained load test are apparently being shot now, and custom backplates are in the works to make the mod look more factory-made. Versions for nearly every card, Founders Edition included, are also going into production.

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.

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.

A Ryzen 9 9950X3D has reportedly died just an hour after being moved into an ASUS ROG Crosshair X670E Hero motherboard. According to Reddit user SpecialistConcept423, posting in r/GamersNexus, the chip had been running fine for about a year and a half in an ASRock X670E Taichi Carrara before the swap. After switching to the new board, no manual overclocking or voltage tweaks were applied; only one of the board's built-in memory presets was enabled for a set of SK hynix 6200 MHz modules. After saving that setting and rebooting, the board threw a "00" Q-Code and refused to post. Pulling the CPU and inspecting it revealed two brown marks on its contacts, which all but confirmed the catastrophic failure.

Things got stranger when the user resorted to an older Ryzen 5 8500G that had previously worked fine on the same board. That chip apparently now throws a "4D" code too, pointing at the motherboard itself as the culprit, not just the CPU. There's no confirmation yet on whether a faulty BIOS, a bad batch of boards, or something else is to blame, and ASUS hasn't commented on this specific case. It is worth noting that the ASUS board was not new, and it had undergone USB-related repairs and a BIOS rewrite. The user has since contacted AMD in Brazil for an RMA, but has shared no updates yet.

DLSS 5 seems to be contributing to increased power draw, and we have our first victim here. Videocardz reports a new melted-connector case on an MSI GeForce RTX 5090 Gaming Trio OC, which surfaced during DLSS 5 Neural Rendering testing in NBA 2K27, currently the only officially supported game. A reader nicknamed erek documented the incident, noting DLSS 5 pushed the card's power draw from around 450 W to over 600 W, which is above MSI's 575 W rating. A GPU-Z screenshot showed a peak board power reading of 613.5 W, which erek says held steady rather than spiking briefly.

Erek reported the card stopped working shortly after, and a burning smell led him to find that the connector's plastic had melted and fused to the socket. We already reported last week that DLSS 5 can push the RTX 5090's power draw unusually high, so this seems to be the first reported case where that added power draw has burned the notorious RTX 5090 power connectors. However, it should be remembered that GPU-Z tracks total board power rather than just the auxiliary connectors, since the PCIe slot also supplies power, so the reading doesn't necessarily mean the connector carried the full load.

Another Ryzen 7 7800X3D has reportedly swollen and burned, while also damaging the ROG Crosshair X670E Hero motherboard in the process. UNIKO's Hardware flagged the case, citing a video posted to Bilibili as the original source. The video shows a Ryzen 7 7800X3D CPU with clear swelling on the underside where it made contact with the CPU socket. There is discoloration on both the CPU and the socket itself. Moreover, the socket pins are warped and damaged in the middle, presumably due to the pressure of the swelling. One peculiar finding is that one of the notches on the CPU socket looks slightly off. Perhaps more importantly, the board's BIOS version wasn't confirmed, which is directly relevant due to AMD's proposed fix.

This kind of failure first showed up in April 2023, when several 7800X3D and 7950X3D chips bulged and took their sockets with them on X670E boards. AMD pinned it on SoC voltage running too high and rolled out AGESA firmware that capped it at 1.30V across AM5 motherboards. This new case might be straightforward if the BIOS hadn't been updated at all. However, even after the BIOS fix, the reports never fully stopped. Just weeks ago, a 7800X3D reportedly burned out on an MSI PRO X870-P WIFI board running the latest BIOS, with EXPO enabled and nothing else touched. We have even seen reports of Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPUs burning in the exact same manner. If you're running a 7800X3D, it's probably worth checking that you're on the latest BIOS and keeping an eye on SoC voltage.