Consider this blackened plug your weekly reminder to check your RTX 50-series GPU cables

If you have a high-end RTX 50-series graphics card then kudos to you. You either got in there early and avoided the massive price hikes that followed, or you managed to get a second mortgage and pick one up anyways. But either way, you're going to want to protect your investment because replacements are hard and expensive to find. And it looks like you really need to protect that investment because there are still regular cases of melting 12+4 pin power cables.

This latest (via Uniko's Hardware) serves as a reminder that getting a cable monitoring solution is a good way to protect your expensive graphics card, as user Edistonian2 notes in a recent reddit thread on the ThermalGrizzly sub. They note that they picked up an RTX 5090 in June and subsequently grabbed a WireView Pro II monitor to keep it safe.

The WireView noted odd current behaviour with two of the pins, while HWInfo said it was fine and a Gemini chat suggested it was an issue with the monitor. I'm sure that's what Nvidia would say, too... So they replace their WireView with a new one, and still get the current issues on pin four. So they removed the cable entirely and the image up top is what was happening on the PSU end of the wire.

They've since picked up another cable and swapped to the other GPU power port on the GPU and so far everything is fine, but it just shows that there are still power issues going on with these cables and a monitoring system can be a worthwhile step in between finding your power leads or plugs melting, or your GPU going up in a puff of smoke.

Now, it's not the cheapest method—the WireView Pro II is $190 at Amazon right now—but that is chump change in relation to the ~$8,000 you might have to spend on a replacement RTX 5090. There are also cheaper alternatives, such as Cooler Master's GPU Shield, which is $50, and the Super Flower 12+4 pin OCP Dongle.

Whichever you choose, as the pricing crisis continues for high-end cards, that's going to be a small price to pay to save something catastrophic happening to your expensive silicon.