Reports of melting 12vHPWR and 12v-2x6 connectors on NVIDIA GPUs—as well as a handful of examples from AMD —have become so common that hardware vendors have started building in safeguards against the issue. One such safeguard is a thermal sensor found on some ASRock power supplies, like the Phantom Gaming PG-1300G, which happened to recently save a user the expense and heartbreak of losing a heavily overclocked NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090.

The incident was reported by user motivman on the Overclock.net forums , and according to the account, the MSI Ventus NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 GPU was overclocked to a whopping 1350 W, which is well over the stock 575 W TDP—although it's not uncommon to exceed rated TDPs during boost scenarios anyway—and it had just completed a benchmark run in 3DMark Port Royal when the PSU triggered a shutdown. The PC would not restart until the cable had cooled down, which is a decent showing for the PSU's safety feature—at least mostly.