ASRock PSU Cable Melts on $16,000 NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 GPU

A power supply cable melted during operation with NVIDIA's RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPU, raising immediate concerns about the safety of the new PCIe CEM5 16-pin connector standard. This incident matters because the RTX PRO 6000 is a high-end professional workstation card that draws significant power, and users investing in this tier of hardware need confidence that their power delivery components will not fail catastrophically. The failure occurred on the power supply side of the connection, leaving the expensive graphics card undamaged but highlighting a critical vulnerability in the power chain.

Thermal protection fails to stop connector damage on high-end workstation card

The hardware involved in this failure is the NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell, a professional GPU rated for up to 600W of total board power. NVIDIA equips this card with 96GB of memory and requires a single PCIe CEM5 16-pin power connector to operate. This connector is part of the newer ATX 3.1 power supply standard, which is designed to handle the high power demands of modern high-performance GPUs. The specific power supply tested in this incident was the ASRock Taichi TC-1650T, a 1650W unit built to meet these new standards.

• Power Connector: PCIe CEM5 16-pin
• TDP: 600W
• Memory: 96GB
• PSU Model: ASRock Taichi TC-1650T
• PSU Standard: ATX 3.1

ASRock designed the power cables for the Taichi TC-1650T with a feature called TempGuard, which includes an NTC temperature sensor. The purpose of this thermal protection is to shut down the system if unsafe temperatures are detected at the connector. However, reports indicate that this safety mechanism failed to trigger before the cable melted. This is the second reported incident involving the RTX PRO 6000 and this specific ASRock PSU model, suggesting a potential pattern rather than an isolated defect.

The RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell is priced at $16,000 USD, making it one of the most expensive consumer-grade graphics cards available. The failure of the power supply cable does not affect the GPU itself, which reportedly survived the incident undamaged. Users relying on this specific power supply for high-wattage professional workloads should be aware of this reported failure mode. The incident underscores the risks associated with early adoption of new power connector standards and high-power professional hardware.