Brazilian YouTube group TecLab has bypassed the RTX 5090's notorious melting problem in the most direct way possible. The group removed the 16-pin connector from the equation entirely and soldered power wires straight onto the PCB. The demonstration used a Galax RTX 5090D HOF OC LAB XOC, an extreme-overclocking variant with two 16-pin inputs and a custom BIOS rated for up to 2,000W, far above the 575W TDP of a standard RTX 5090. TecLab framed the mod as a sarcastic jab at NVIDIA, saying that enthusiasts are tired of hearing about connectors melting and that they wanted to show how it should have been done from the start. The team stripped the card's stock cooler entirely, running the bare GPU under an industrial liquid chiller with two loosely mounted fans for extra airflow. Two adapters converted standard 16-pin PSU cables into bare wires, which were then soldered directly onto the connector traces on the board. No temperature readings were shared, but a roughly 50A draw on the 12V rail put the card at around 600W during testing, and it booted and ran benchmarks without issue.

Melting 16-pin and 12V-2x6 connectors have plagued the RTX 5090 since launch. We have reported several such confirmed cases over the past year despite NVIDIA's redesigned connector geometry. Bypassing the connector is clearly not something regular owners should attempt on a nearly $5,000 card, and it doesn't address the underlying current-imbalance issues tied to the 12V-2x6 standard itself. Still, a soldered PCB connection outlasting NVIDIA's official fix says plenty about how unresolved this problem remains after all this time.