PNY has denied a warranty claim on a burned-out GeForce RTX 5090, telling the card’s owner that only its own bundled power cable is covered, even though the cable that failed came from his power supply, not a third-party seller. The company closed his support ticket after he asked which part of that policy applied to his case.
Why PNY denied the RTX 5090 warranty claim
The RTX 5090 warranty claim comes from a Redditor posting as Melodic_Initial_1767, who says his card died last month after both ends of its 12V-2×6 cable melted: the connector on the GPU side and the connector on the power-supply side. He says the card was running at stock clocks with no overclock, a power limit set below default, and was sitting idle when it failed. The cable was the one bundled with his ASRock PG-1600G, a 1600-watt power supply, rather than a cheap third-party adapter of the kind usually blamed for 12VHPWR-style failures.
PNY’s reply, which the owner posted, states that “all PNY GPUs that require a 16-pin (12VHPWR / 12V-2×6) input include a PNY-approved power cable or adapter in the box,” and that this is “the only configuration covered under warranty.” Damage caused by “a third-party power cable, adapter, or PSU cable,” the reply continues, falls on that part’s manufacturer rather than PNY. Under that reading, a cable that shipped inside an ASRock power supply built specifically to run a card like the RTX 5090 still counts as third-party.
A warranty document that never names the cable it enforces
The owner says he checked PNY’s printed warranty terms and the RTX 5090 installation guide and found no reference to “approved cables,” 12V-2×6, or 12VHPWR in either document. The only power-related requirement he could find was a line stating the card must be “installed in accordance with the installation guide provided.” When he asked PNY twice which specific clause supported the denial, a support agent identifying as a “Senior Technician” said the decision was final and closed the ticket without answering. That leaves the cable requirement PNY is enforcing written nowhere the customer could have read in advance of buying the card.
That gap matters beyond one ticket. Any RTX 5090 owner running a different brand of ATX 3.0 power supply, using the cable that shipped with it, would seemingly fall under the same “third-party” label PNY applied here, since the warranty text draws no distinction between cable brands at all.
Why teqpost has covered this connector before
This isn’t a new fault line for the RTX 5090’s connector. In September we covered modders replacing the card’s 16-pin connector with three separate 8-pin connectors, distrusting the 12V-2×6 standard rather than any single cable, and a day later Cooler Master’s GPU Shield adapter reached the US market as a load-balancing fix for the same melting pattern. Both are aftermarket answers to a hardware-level problem. Neither helps an owner who bought the card as sold and used the cable it shipped with, which is exactly the position this warranty denial creates: fixes for the connector itself exist, but the manufacturer’s warranty apparently doesn’t have to follow the card into its stock configuration if that configuration fails.
What to watch
PNY hasn’t issued any statement beyond the ticket response, and its warranty document still doesn’t name the 12V-2×6 standard anywhere. Whether that document gets rewritten, or whether PNY reverses this specific denial once it draws wider attention, is what’s worth watching next.
