NVIDIA RTX 5070 cards with burnt out 12VHPWR aren’t as common as cases of RTX 5090 GPUs suffering the dreaded fate, but it’s clear that not even the mid-range Blackwell GPU is safe from the potential fire hazard. One user posted their friend’s unfortunate situation on Reddit.
The Redditor, Gatlyng, only posted a picture of the melted 12VHPWR, allegedly belonging to an RTX 5070 of a friend of theirs, who complained that they began experiencing random black screens, followed by reboots. To be fair, the Redditor says that his friend may not have fully plugged the cable in. In which case, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that that was the cause of it. That said, the card is still less of a power-hungry component compared to the RTX 5090, drawing 250W of power, far less than the 600W power consumption of the top-tier Blackwell GPU. As a reminder, a 12VHPWR connector that isn’t fully seated or connected to the card or PSU runs the risk of creating poor electrical contact, which in turn increases resistance and generates enough heat to damage the connector or worse, burn down a system and the house along with it. That being said, even the most cautious efforts to ensure this never occurs don’t always work.
