A few months ago, we covered the first reported case of a 16-pin power connector meltdown for AMD's RX 9070 XT. Usually, it's Nvidia's RTX 4090 and 5090s that face the fire, but Sapphire has adopted the same 16-pin power connector on one of its RDNA 4 GPUs. Today, another report has surfaced on Reddit where a user found their Nitro+ RX 9070 XT with a considerably scorched connector after experiencing a period of system instability.
Another one bites the dust - Sapphire 9070XT Nitro+ 12V HPWR FAIL from r/radeon
This is possibly the fifth time an RX 9070 XT has been subject to the incendiary nature of the 12V-2x6 connector. As u/divinethreshold describes on the r/pcmasterrace subbredit, their PC had started randomly crashing with little to no stability even after checking all the components. The last part to troubleshoot was the GPU and, sure enough, after plugging out the cable, they found scorch marks on the top-row of 16-pin connector.
Usually, we're left to guesstimate what happened in a certain case, but here it's pretty clear that the pins in the bottom didn't make proper contact with the GPU's female plug, leading to increased load on the top row. Despite the fact that the RX 9070 XT is a midrange card with only 304W of TGP, the electrical load was too much for just half of the pins, so they got scorched. Otherwise, the 12V-2x6 connector is rated for up to 600W of power.
We've covered several reports pertaining to melting 16-pin power connectors, the most recent of which was an RTX 5090. For AMD's RX 9070 XT, though, every single case has exhibited the same issue: the top row of the 16-pin power connector is what burns out. The first case was a ASRock Taichi card back in August, then Sapphire's Nitro+ design made rounds once in October, and twice in November, leading us to the fourth case for the same variant today; fifth overall.
The damage is easily visible in all these cases because Sapphire provides a blue-tipped 16-pin to 8-pin adapter that most people use with their older power supplies. This adapter essentially takes what's a 32-pin connection (16 on either side) to an 80-pin connection, which more than doubles the points of failures. It's simple math; the more factors there are in an equation, the more likely it's to break down with even the slightest of errors.
Speaking of, these 16-pin connector woes are often attributed to user error, that the customer hasn't firmly secured the cables in place on either end. However, across the myriad of cases we've seen at this point, there's no discernible pattern beyond the abdsence of any consistent secondary factor. Some people using modern ATX 3.1 power supplies with native 16-pin cables, ensuring a tight, unbent connection, and never overclocking their GPU still walk away with scorched kit.
The popular claim in the community, therefore, is that the 16-pin connector itself is flawed due to being under-designed (despite receiving a revision). It shouldn't take an extraordinary amount of effort just to prevent malfunction, which leads many to even argue that any other product would've been recalled at this point following so many duds. The OP on Reddit said they'll go for an RMA, so we hope their RX 9070 XT is resurrected one way or another.
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