PNY allegedly refuses to cover melted RTX 5090 powered by native power supply cable

When you buy a product, there is a reasonable expectation of warranty service. When you spend multiple thousands of dollars on a computer graphics card (a product category that has only recently entered the multi-thousand-dollar range), there is a reasonable expectation of exceptional service. What if, instead, you got absolutely no service? According to Redditor /u/Melodic_Initial_1767, that's what he got when he tried to RMA his burned GeForce RTX 5090.

Like so many others, "Melodic" found his graphics card non-functional after melting the 12V-2x6 connectors on both ends of the modular cable that came with his 1600-watt ASRock power supply (the PG-1600G, which we reviewed last year). This happened despite the fact that he says he was using the stock BIOS, no overclocking, and, in fact, a manually reduced power limit. Moreover, the card was supposedly sitting idle when it died, although that doesn't really mean anything. He opened a ticket with PNY and says he was denied the next day with this response:

Well, he wasn't using the included cable or an approved one, but he was using the native cable from his power supply; surely that should be good enough, right? After all, the warranty terms actually don't appear to say a single thing about 12VHPWR or 12V-2x6 cables. According to the Redditor, the only thing the warranty says about power is that the card has to be "installed in accordance with the installation guide provided herewith." Guess what the installation guide says?

If you guessed "locate an unused power connector within your system and plug it into the corresponding connector on your graphics card," congratulations, you will also be denied warranty service from PNY, because apparently you have to intuit which cables are approved by PNY, since, as far as we can see, there's no list of approved cables anywhere on PNY's website, nor in the product documentation for its graphics cards. Besides, the card didn't come with a 16-pin cable, so it's not like he could have used PNY's own cable, and the idea that the firm would prefer him to use an "octopus" adapter over a native cable is shaky at best.

I personally have never had the pleasure of dealing with PNY support, but multiple other Redditors in the thread, which is nearing 1,200 replies at this point, have mentioned a history of difficulty getting support from PNY. When asking the company which clause of their warranty policy they are using to deny his warranty request, /u/Melodic_Initial_1767 was apparently told by a "Senior Technician" that the decision is final and that his ticket had been closed.

A notable point brought up by /u/dusto_man in the thread is that the ASRock power supply used by "Melodic" advertises a "TempGuard" feature that supposedly monitors the temperature at the 12V-2x6 connector on the PSU side for safety, but clearly that either wasn't configured or also failed. ASRock offers a ten-year warranty on that unit; /u/dusto_man mentioned this in a thread where users were advising the original poster to contact ASRock and let that firm go after PNY to avoid covering the failed GPU, which is worth multiple thousands of dollars now.

Indeed, that could be why PNY is attempting to shut down the RMA attempt. The firm may not have any GeForce RTX 5090 cards to send him, and even if it does, the cheapest GeForce RTX 5090 card available to buy new on the market today is $4400 USD, and PNY would likely prefer to sell it at that price instead. While the board vendor is most likely only on the hook (legally) for /u/Melodic_Initial_1767's original purchase price, that could still easily be $2,000 or more. We have now seen these same RMA denial patterns with storage and memory devices from multiple vendors during the shortage, so it wouldn't be an exception. We'll have to wait and see if PNY will stand on unwritten technicalities rather than take a hit to its bottom line.

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