Curse of 12VHPWR lives on: Ill-fated connector reportedly burns out on RX 9070 XT
Ever since its debut on the RTX 40 series, the 12VHPWR power connector has garnered a reputation for being unreliable and a safety hazard. The new connector was meant to be a streamlined replacement of the traditional 6-pin and 8-pin connectors, as it could deliver up to 600 W through a single cable. However, Nvidia’s experiment proved to be a disaster as the 12VHPWR was melting left and right. Gamers Nexus labeled the connector a “Dumpster Fire” and for good reason.
While Nvidia did use a revised version of the connector in the RTX 50 series, there were still reports of the new 12V-2x6 cables failing. Here, AMD’s decision to stay away from the 12VHPWR and the latest 12V-2x6 saved the company a lot of PR nightmares. However, there are still some AIB Radeon models that rely on 12VHPWR/12V-2x6. One of those boards is the Sapphire Nitro+ RX 9070 XT that has now, according to a post on r/pcmasterrace, fallen victim to a burned-out 12VHPWR connector.
What’s concerning is that the affected RX 9070 XT was reportedly only used for around 2 months and remained under the 600 W power limit. The GPU was also undervolted, which would’ve further reduced the load on the cable.
The good thing is that Sapphire has seemingly agreed to accept an RMA request from the user and will either replace or fix the affected RX 9070 XT.
While there are only a few Radeon RX 9070 XT AIB models that come with a 12VHPWR power connector, this recent example tells us that the reliability of the 12VHPWR is still very much a concern. Granted, there can be a whole host of other factors at play here. For instance, the cable could’ve been plugged improperly. But the fact that the 12VHPWR connector has been involved in multiple incidents, involving both Radeon and GeForce GPUs, should seriously give users second thoughts about buying a GPU using this connector.
So, if you want a Radeon RX 9070 XT, you might be better served by going with a model that uses a traditional 8-pin connector.
