(Image credit: TecLab on YouTube)
Ever since the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 launched (and the RTX 4090 before it), reports of the card burning down have been commonplace in the community. The culprit behind the GPU's incendiary nature is the 16-pin power connector that's notorious for being unreliable... so what if we got rid of it in the first place? That's what Brazilian YouTuber TecLab did in their latest experiment — stripping an RTX 5090 down and powering it through wires directly soldered to the PCB.
Aí o cara chora! ... perder 25K por causa de um conector. - YouTube
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The GPU used for this test was a very high-end Galax HOF OC LAB XOC variant of the RTX 5090D. Unlike standard RTX 5090s that come with a single 16-pin connector for their 575W TDPs, this bad boy is equipped with twice the firepower (literally) since you can use up to 2,000W OC BIOSes on it. That already sounds like a bad idea, but TecLab went further and removed the heatsink and fans entirely to liquid-cool the core.The modders took two sets of wires and soldered them right above either power connector on the PCB, linking them to the connectors' traces. They used two adapters to intercept standard 16-pin power cables coming from a PSU and convert them into bare wires that could be soldered easily. From the looks of it, the poor soldering job was only going to put these guys in more danger, but it somehow worked.
