The drive to push the performance envelope of modern GPUs often comes at the cost of power. As NVIDIA’s high-end cards keep climbing in performance, so does the frequency of their power connectors melting down. This time, however, it’s not even a flagship model like the 4090 or 5090, but rather a budget GPU from the Ampere series — the RTX 3060 Ti.
A user on Baidu reported the power connector of their RTX 3060 Ti GDDR6X melting down in a freak incident, specifically the Asus Megalodon V2. It’s worth noting that this is a special variant of the 3060 Ti designed exclusively for the Chinese market and, as such, it features a 12VHPWR power connector instead of the standard 8 or 6-pin that was the default with the 30-series.
However, the cable that the user received was a standard 12-pin cable that lacked the additional 4 pins present in a normal 16-pin 12VHPWR connector. These extra four pins are purposefully there to ensure a secure connection between the card and the cable, precisely in order to combat situations like this one.
You may like
-
RTX 5090 yellow-tipped connector becomes a charred mess following GPU meltdown -
![]()
Another RTX 5090 connector melts down, reportedly taking a PSU with it -
Nvidia RTX 5090D falls victim to infamous 16-pin melting issue
Therefore, this can be chalked up to a strange and unacceptable mistake on Asus’ part, especially when you dig a little deeper. In the photos supplied by the user, a dual 8-pin to 12-pin adapter can be seen, which ships with some 12-pin GPUs for use with older power supplies that don’t have these new connectors.