He used UN-powered riser cards. If he had used powered ones, the ATX cable wouldn't have to keep up with the +250W of load.
Even though if this happened with +250W, it would as well have happened with the plain +225W which would have been within the spec.
In standard form the ATX12V 12-pin can take around 144W, this is because it is rated at 6A per contact if it is not the HCS implementation.
HCS I think increases that to 9A giving total of 216W for the 24-pin connector (none of this is applicable to the PCIe slot in context of an HCS rating).
He should really check before using 3xGPU in an un-powered riser, it is fair to expect that the average Watts for the mainboard 12V would be around 35-45W per card for an average total of 135W in the higher characteristic, but that should never be taken for granted..
Anyway, I do think the concern around any of this is longer term use and then pulling out cards/putting new ones in; that is where one would more likely see the 480s a motherboard a few years from now when replaced -
Caveat being this would only be applicable to a minority of cases IMO and excluding mGPU (especially insane 3-cards) or OC/power target in this context.
Just to clarify some other posts, he used 3 x 280X.
No, it's an Asus P7P55-LX, it was the 1st rig I built. Ran for 3 years with 3 280x and non-powered risers. 6 hours with the 480s and poof!!
The worst 290x I found measured was the MSI with around 32.5W average pulled through the mainboard PCIe slot and total 258W all power connections.
The 380X Nitro pulls in worst case scenario (Metro Last Light 4K) 48W average through the mainboard PCIe slot (total all power connections 191W) - that would possibly be putting a long term stress on the ATX12V 12V motherboard power without extra power if going 3 of those, but also depends if that board model is HCS rated.
The 280X has no detailed analysis and only shows a total of 207W all power connections, above the 380X Nitro but we cannot assume if the distribution is more like the 290X or the 380X.
So it is possible the 280X was at the limit or very close to the motherboard capability and then the situation finally with the combined average of 246W through the ATX12V 24-pin connector.
However an important point, this goes to show that one cannot rely upon the ATX power protection to shut down the machine before a catastrophic failure.
The biggest point though, at least AMD has a fix coming very soon.
Cheers