Users Reporting NVIDIA RTX 4090 16-pin Power Connectors are Melting!

Two Redditors have reported that their RTX 4090 graphics cards have inexplicably stopped working, and they suspect that melted power connections are to be blamed.

Today, users reggie _gakil and NoDuelsPolicyy uploaded pictures of their melted 16-pin (also known as 12VHPWR) connections on their RTX 4090 graphics cards on Reddit. The failure of their cards may have been caused by NVIDIA’s new 600W.

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Smoke was involved with Reggie’s card catching fire, but Duel’s card merely shut down, and the burned power adapter/connector was found afterward. These are the newest RTX 4090 graphics cards, the first of their kind to use a 16-pin power connection.

There were rumors of PCI-SIG (the body responsible for the PCIe specifications) worrying about new power adapters’ “thermal variance” before Nvidia’s RTX 4090 card was even announced. It turned out that NVIDIA was the one that initially alerted PCI-SIG to the problem.

The company found after evaluating several implementations of the new 12VHPWR connector that extreme bending and exceeding connection cycles over 40 may result in thermal hotspots and, in some circumstances, melting of the cables.

Unfortunately, we do not know if these specific cards were afflicted by the bending issue; however, it is true that many RTX 4090 owners find it difficult to fit their cards into the chassis without bending the wire over the specified ‘3 cm’.

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Despite the fact that this was anticipated to happen at some point, it is still not good for NVIDIA, who is the new cable’s initial adopter. For the time being, these are the only two recorded cases of the new cards burning up in smoke, but there are certain to be more. NVIDIA has already communicated with the original Reddit user about this issue; thus, we may receive a statement at a later time.

Via Wccftech