Modders at the Brazilian YouTube channel TecLab got an RTX 5090 running on three standard 8-pin PCIe connectors instead of the 16-pin design that has been prone to melting on high-end Nvidia cards. The team used a Galax GeForce RTX 5090D HOF OC LAB XOC, a top-of-the-line model that normally features dual 16-pin power connectors, and stripped it down to the bare PCB, removing both native 16-pin inputs.
Three 8-pin connectors were then soldered directly to the power regulators on the PCB using heavy-gauge cables. The sense pins were rewired so the card could still request its full power load without restriction, and a liquid cooling system with a GPU block was used to keep temperatures in check. The entire mod was done at the hardware level, with no BIOS or software tweaks involved.
During a roughly one-hour livestream, the modders gradually ramped the card's power draw from 400 W up to 900 W across the three 8-pin cables. At its peak, the card pulled more than 120 A while holding clock speeds as high as 3,400 MHz. When tested with just two cables, power draw dropped to 66 A while clocks held at 3,200 MHz, and with a single 8-pin cable, the card still managed 65 A and 3,100 MHz. Throughout testing, the modified RTX 5090 stayed within its power and thermal limits.
This is the second time this month TecLab has soldered its way around the RTX 5090's power delivery. Days earlier, the same team bypassed the 16-pin connectors entirely by wiring cables directly to the PCB traces, an approach they acknowledged wasn't practical for regular users.
Reports of melted 16-pin connectors have followed the RTX 5090 since launch, and even heavily underclocked cards have reportedly suffered the problem. The issue is not limited to Nvidia's RTX 50 and RTX 40 series, as certain AMD Radeon cards using the 16-pin connector are also said to be at risk, despite PCI-SIG revising the 12V-2x6 connector design to improve reliability.
The experiment suggests the melting problem was never really about how much power the card needs, but about the connector chosen to deliver it. While this mod likely won't bring 8-pin connectors back to flagship GPUs, it demonstrates that the older connector standard can still handle the extreme power demands of a modern high-end GPU.