An RTX 5090 owner says PNY turned down their warranty claim on a card with a melted 12V-2×6 connector because it was powered by the power supply's own 16-pin cable rather than the adapter in PNY's box. PNY has not said publicly whether that is policy. Another owner who asked PNY support the same question in advance got a different answer.
What PNY reportedly told owners
According to Reddit user Melodic_Initial_1767, their card stopped working with both ends of the modular cable melted, on the GPU side and at the 1,600 W ASRock PG-1600G it came with, Tom's Hardware reports. The owner says it ran the stock BIOS with no overclock and a manually lowered power limit.
The reply the owner posted says the PNY-approved cable or adapter included with every 16-pin PNY card "is the only configuration covered under warranty", and that melting after any third-party cable, adapter or PSU cable is the responsibility of whoever made that cable. Asked which warranty clause that rests on, a senior technician reportedly called the decision final and closed the ticket.
The owner's case is that the published terms never say this. According to the thread, the warranty only asks for installation per the included guide, and that guide tells builders to find an unused power connector in the system and plug it into the card. Tom's found no list of approved cables on PNY's site or in its card documentation. HotHardware checked PNY's warranty page and found only a "when used normally" condition.
Then there is the second ticket. A different Redditor asked PNY whether the new 12V-2×6 cable that came with their PSU would void the warranty and, per HotHardware, was told: "You can use it if you wish." Either one of those agents was wrong or the rule depends on who answers. All of this is one side's account; PNY had not responded publicly when HotHardware published on September 27.
The rule as reported also favors the multi-plug "octopus" adapter that came with the card over a native 16-pin cable, and Tom's calls the idea that PNY would prefer it shaky at best. The ASRock unit even advertises a TempGuard sensor at its own 12V-2×6 socket, Tom's notes, which evidently did not stop this failure.
How hot the RTX 5090's connector runs under DLSS 5
Korean outlet QuasarZone measured what DLSS 5 does to that connector, as reported by Guru3D and VideoCardz. The run was Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K, Ultra preset, DLSS Quality, for 20 minutes in a room at about 27.5°C.
On an RTX 5090 Founders Edition, the sense-pin side of the connector rose from 80.9°C to 91.7°C with DLSS 5 on. The 16-pin input averaged 582.7 W and peaked at 646.7 W, against 516.5 W and 571.7 W without it.
The per-pin numbers are the part worth keeping. On an ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5090 limited to the same 575 W, the six power pins carried 6.94 to 7.47 A without DLSS 5 and 7.83 to 8.51 A with it. All six stayed under the 9.2 A pin rating, but QuasarZone calculated that if one pin stopped carrying current, the worst remaining pin would reach about 10.1 A under the DLSS 5 load, against about 8.9 A without it. That is a calculation, not a measured failure, and Guru3D rightly points out that the test does not show DLSS 5 melting anything. It does show the pins carrying more current under DLSS 5, so if one pin seats badly and stops taking its share, the rest have less room before they pass the rating, whichever cable they sit in.
The bundled adapter is no safe harbor either
If PNY's reported rule is meant to steer owners onto the part in the box, a separate report undercuts it. A Gigabyte RTX 4090 owner found a burned contact on the card's own bundled 8-pin-to-16-pin adapter after a run of black screens with audio still playing, VideoCardz reports via UNIKO's Hardware. The card had been held to an 80% power limit, about 360 W of its 450 W target, and the 2021 Corsair RM1000x feeding it has no native 16-pin output. The PSU-side plugs looked normal; a white mark sat inside the card's connector.
That is one owner's report, and VideoCardz says spotting the damage early probably saved the card. It is also the configuration PNY's reported rule treats as the safe one.