Sam Machkovech
Nvidia’s $1,599 GeForce RTX 4090 is an extremely highly effective graphics card, however its efficiency comes at the price of excessive energy draw. Like a couple of of the RTX 3000-series playing cards, Nvidia makes use of a brand new type of 16-pin 12VHPWR energy connector to provide all that energy to the cardboard—you possibly can plug as much as 4 8-pin GPU energy cables into the 12VHPWR adapter, which then plugs into the connector on the GPU, saving some board area.
However no less than two RT 4090 customers at the moment are reporting that their 12VHPWR connectors have overheated and melted throughout use. These complaints are sourced from Reddit (through Tom’s {Hardware}), so take them with a grain of salt—we do not know the precise configuration of both person’s PC setup. The precise mannequin of graphics card (a Gigabyte RTX 4090 Gaming OC for one person, an Asus RTX 4090 TUF Gaming OC Version for the opposite), the facility provide, and any variety of different elements might have contributed to the connectors overheating.
For its half, Nvidia informed Tom’s that it’s “investigating the studies” and that the corporate is “in touch with the primary proprietor” and deliberate to achieve out to the opposite. We have adopted up with Nvidia and can replace this text if the corporate has extra info to share.
Tom’s {Hardware} speculates that the difficulty may very well be attributable to a bend within the cable too near the facility connector, inflicting a few of its pins to “misalign” or come unseated, probably creating an uneven energy load throughout the pins. We’ll control the difficulty till it is clearer whether or not these have been one-off person failures or an indication of a extra systemic drawback with the RTX 4090 sequence.
