An enthusiast reported that enabling DLSS 5 on an MSI RTX 5090 Gaming Trio OC pushed the graphics card past 600W before its 16-pin power connector melted, according to a user report covered by Tom's Hardware. The card, which carries a 575W TDP, had previously drawn around 450W during gaming, but GPU-Z showed it hovering above 610W consistently while DLSS 5 was active. The user, identified as erek, experienced instability and a burning smell before the card stopped working entirely. The melted plastic bonded the cable to the connector, and when separated, at least five pins on the 16-pin cable were scorched, with one pin's housing completely destroyed. The cable featured a yellow tip meant to confirm a secure connection, but the damage was still visible.
The 16-pin connector is rated to carry up to 600W on its own, though the PCIe x16 slot also provides 75W, meaning the connector was not necessarily drawing over its limit alone. Tom's Hardware notes it cannot confirm that DLSS 5 was the actual cause of the failure, as melted connectors on RTX 5090 cards are often tied to loose fits between the cable and connector. However, the outlet's own testing aligns with the hypothesis that the neural rendering feature significantly increases power draw. In Control, Tom's Hardware measured an MSI Lightning Z variant of the 5090, which uses dual 16-pin connectors and a 1,000W XOC BIOS, pulling 800W with DLSS 5 enabled versus 691W without it.
A more dramatic difference appeared in Hogwarts Legacy, where the same high-end variant drew 480W without DLSS 5 and 720W with it enabled, a 50 percent increase. Even the Founder's Edition of the RTX 5090, which uses a single 16-pin connector, saw power consumption jump from 417W to 547W when DLSS 5 was toggled on, representing a 31 percent rise. Given that the user's MSI model falls between those two configurations in terms of power capacity, the report suggests it is not unreasonable to suspect DLSS 5 as the culprit, especially since no abnormal behavior was noted before the feature was enabled.
The source article indicates that NBA 2K27 is currently the only game with official DLSS 5 support, and the user's testing involved modded implementations. Nvidia has not commented on the report, and the company has yet to address the efficiency concerns raised by these findings. The safety implications of DLSS 5's power draw could affect US owners of RTX 50-series cards, particularly those using standard single-connector designs. Tom's Hardware concludes that while the feature offers performance benefits, its impact on power consumption and potential hardware damage needs to be resolved before it is extended to older RTX 40-series cards.
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