// TOM'S HARDWARE US — HARDWARE & GADGET
$5,245 prebuilt RTX 5090 PC's connectors melt after sitting boxed for a year
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When a PC gamer's GPU with a 12VHPWR or 12V-2x6 power connector melts, it's often in a computer they built by hand, and they typically only have one chance at recourse — hoping their GPU is under warranty and making a claim.
But it ends up that when someone else built your PC, it could open up a can of worms that has two companies pointing the blame at each other while a customer sits with a burned-up RTX 5090, power supply, and power cords.
That's what happened to Tom's Hardware reader Anthony DeMarco, whose father purchased a Digital Storm Corsa for him ahead of his first job after graduating from college. DeMarco says he suggested his father purchase the system before RAM prices went up. The system was delivered in May of 2025. DeMarco says he tested the system, then packed it up for when he got a job. That jealousy-inducing system included an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X, 2TB Crucial T700 Pro SSD, 64GB of Kingston Fury RGB RAM, and, crucially, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 from PNY. The computer cost $5,245.00 before tax.
DeMarco says he got the computer from his father in August 2026, upon starting his job. He says the problems started two weeks later.
"I noticed a strange burning smell from near my computer," he recalled to Tom's Hardware, wondering if it was an issue with dust from another PC he owned. "The next day I noticed my monitor screen kept flickering. I then used Claude to try to figure out the issue and it pointed to the GPU, and then I checked the wires and noticed them very melted and burned. I immediately powered off my computer so hopefully my GPU is still functional."
But that's hard for him to tell. The cable was "fused" into the connector, and while he managed to separate the pieces, some of the connectors are still stuck together.
The damage went beyond the GPU, with the "most severe" damage at the power supply, a 1,000-watt semi-modular model from Digital Storm with an 80-Plus Gold rating. This is the cheapest, default option you get when you pick an RTX 5090 on the Corsa configurator, though his PSU cables are an upgrade with custom blue sleeving. "The cable into the power supply is completely melted and the cable head is completely fused into the power supply with bare wires exposed at both ends of the cable," he said.
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DeMarco claims that he checked that all the cabling was in place after his father formally gave him the PC.