With RTX 50s melting people's cables, this GPU's diagnostic feature acts as an extra pair of eyes on your power

Would you purchase a specific brand's GPU because it came with diagnostic LEDs that warned you if your card's power supply wasn't doing so hot? Galax banked on this when it created its take on the GeForce RTX GPUs. Using some pretty clever tech, its last range of cards displayed a visual warning signal when something was going wrong. Fortunately, this same feature has made its way onto Galax's RTX 50 series, too, and given the reports of cards melting power cables, this feature could potentially help you spot the issue before it does too much damage.

Galax's LED diagnostic technology is especially welcome with its RTX 50 series cards

As spotted by Tom's Hardware, Galax is showing off its new Hall of Fame branded GeForce RTX graphics cards. One of the selling points for Galax's 4090 card is that it featured a fan of LED strips that would show you pretty colors as you played your games. However, these LEDs weren't just for show, as they also acted as an early warning system for GPU power issues.

As per the GeForce RTX 4090 HOF page, the LEDs could turn either yellow or red depending on the severity of the detected problem. If it showed you yellow, that means you didn't install the 16 pin power connectors correctly. Meanwhile, a red light is a warning that the motherboard power connectors aren't plugged in properly. It was a cool and thoughtful way to ensure people managed to install their GPUs the right way.

Fast forward to today, and we have Galax's GeForce RTX 5080 HOF GPU. Again, we see the addition of yellow and red warning LEDs, albeit the red one has changed to signify "when the PCIe slot power is abnormal." And while this, at first glance, seems to be a migration of a useful tool from the 4090 GPU, it's especially welcome now that we're getting reports of RTX 50 GPUs melting through people's power cables.

Galax never explicitly states that the LED system can identify and warn the user when the cable's about to melt. In fact, a lot of GPU owners aren't sure what, exactly, is doing all the damage. However, if I were to grab an RTX 50 GPU, I'd definitely opt for one that warned me if something weird was going on with the power. Not taking any chances with that one.

If you'd rather not take your odds with an RTX 50 card, first of all, I don't blame you. However, we do have some resources on how to get the most out of your hardware without taking the plunge with Nvidia's newest GPU. Check out what one of our writers did instead of upgrading to an Nvidia RTX 50 GPU, and 7 older GPUs to buy instead of the RTX 50 series. Or, have a read of our opinion piece on how Nvidia's treatment of the RTX 50 series shows the company doesn't care about gaming anymore