Sapphire’s blue-tipped 12V-2×6 power adapter burns

First it was ASRock, now it’s Sapphire.

Only two AMD board partners have adopted the new power connector design so far, ASrock and Sapphire. For ASRock, this was likely a natural decision since the company recently entered the power supply market with native 12V-2×6 implementation. Unforutnately this brand’s GPU was already a victim of said connector design, specifically the Taichi RX 9070XT model . Sapphire, on the other hand, has not released any new power supplies but decided to use the connector on select models anyway.

Sapphire equipped its NITRO+ RX 9070 cards with the 12V-2×6 power connector. The RX 9060 models do not use it, nor do they need to, as the Navi 44-based GPUs draw less power. One RX 9070 XT NITRO+ card, owned by a Reddit user, has unfortunately become the first known case to suffer from a melting connector issue.

According to the user, the GPU was powered using the included blue-tipped adapter connected to three 8-pin cables from a Corsair RM1000X PSU, which lacks a native 16-pin connector.

Source: e92justin/Reddit

The affected user did not share photos of the GPU connector but assumed it is no longer safe to use. At least four pins visibly show burn marks, suggesting uneven power distribution across the 6-pin contact area.

It’s worth noting that the Sapphire NITRO+ is a high-end version of the RX 9070 XT but consumes far less power than RTX 5090 cards, around 360W, according to other users.

Both AMD and NVIDIA remain quiet about the future of the 12V-2×6 design. It’s unclear whether another revision will be introduced or if both companies will require GPUs to include power-balancing and advanced overheating detection systems similar to those found on ASUS ROG Astral RTX 50 cards.

Source: Reddit