TaintedSquirrel
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MSI AI1300P
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Nvidia RTX 4090 power connectors melting?
- Thread starter Rockenrooster
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cvinh
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How bad is Nvidia going to let this get before they make a statement?
TaintedSquirrel
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Nvidia cares more about the legal ramifications of both their statement and the cables melting more than they care about their customers.
So... Whenever the lawyers, engineers, and marketing team come to an agreement.
CAD4466HK
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I must be blind duh.
Darunion
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This is going to end with a hardened connector that is super ugly that people wont use because it messes up their cable routing.
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Zarathustra[H]
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Furious_Styles
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I imagine it has to get a lot worse. Right now they can just blame it on a few bad connectors/user error.
Comixbooks
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Armenius
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It's NVIDIA's fault for supporting the new power standard? What does PCI-SIG have to say on the matter? Have they made any kind of statement yet?
DooKey
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NV is at fault for not properly vetting their adapter supplier's product. Aren't there rumors a bad batch are at fault?
I believe the native plugs should be just fine. Will there be failures with the native plugs? Yep, just as there have been with all plugs that came before these. People make mistakes plugging them in, manufacturers sometimes have a bad batch, etc.
Ultimately a standards organization vetted this type of connector, and they don't do that in a vacuum.
cvinh
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Whose product is it? Who made money on the 4090s? If I'm paying $2k for a product I expect it to work properly. I guess we are lowering our standards now.
If the absence in stories about the 3090TI that were using the same new power standard are true, it is hard to not point to NVIDIA adapter and-or the card handle to be automatically in part responsible.
the 3090TI seem to point to be impossible for the issue to be all about the new power standard.
GoodBoy
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2 different designs... I suspect the crummy cable might have been sourced by the AIB's...
Has anyone heard of the adapter with the FE's having this issue?
But could also have been the rush to get sufficient quantities manufactured, so 2 or more suppliers were used. The pin soldering layout that GN found in theirs seems superior to the one that igor found to have failed.
NukeDukem
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I too would like to know if the FE has been affected. The reports I've seen so far have been ASUS, MSI and Gigabyte models.
ZeroBarrier
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Maybe it's just me, but the plastic looks chewed up, not burnt. Almost as if the user had tried to force it in incorrectly causing damage to the plastic instead of it melting. Am I crazy here?
Niner21
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I am not sticking up for Nvidia, but I'm thinking some of these cases may be to blame on user error.
Niner21
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I had a instance when I first got my card, and everything was up and running just fine. Ran the PC for a short time and then checked things over to find that the cable was not fully seated into the connector, and upon pushing it in the rest of the way I heard a faint click. The latch is on the bottom of the connector with these cards, and if you are not careful this could be missed. You need to hear that faint click that is not the same as you would here on a 8 pin PCIE connector. Not saying this is what happened to these users, but it may be an error on their part.
At least one person claiming to have an FE posted to Reddit yesterday. I think there was a previous post here in this thread mentioning it.
Most likely, but it does seem there is little to none tolerance due to the small size of the connector. More audible click connector, thermistor on connector or some kind of connection sensor seems like a reasonable cost to help prevent a simple user error and costly RMAs.
Niner21
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I totally agree with you there. Should have been a more stable connector IMO.
sfsuphysics
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I would like to think that nvidia spent more hours testing these products then how long they have existed in the wild by a large margin ... so why didn't any of this shit come up before? Or were they all set up on test benches where wire alignment wasn't a thing?
GoodBoy
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I think on many of these reports, only the connector on the adapter melted, the GPU side connector was ok. I know that was on at least 2 that I read about. Not sure if that is the majority of cases or not. Seems like at least a few cards would have damage to their connector too, but these might be in the minority. Adapter only damage is pretty fortunate for the AIB's as those are comparatively cheap. Even if the 12vhpwr connector on a GPU needs replaced, that's likely not all that expensive. If the AIB's even bother to fix anything, not sure on that. The connector (probably 50 cents or less), and the labor (majority of the cost, probably about $50).
Has anyone compiled a list of reports so that we know how common this has been?
The 12vhpwr connector itself I don't think is the problem. I have a 3090 and after reading the stories of melting connectors, used my MicroTemp digital thermometer on mine after gaming for awhile, and the temps on mine were fine. The most I have seen the card pull was 417W, so its close to what the 4090 would pull if under a heavier load. 3090, and 3090Ti users are a large enough sized test pool for the 12vhpwr connector in general. 600W is still well within its capabilities per the manufacturers' doc (link to pdf someone pasted earlier in the thread).
It's been reported by some covering this that all the adapters were sourced by Nvidia and they forced all the AIBs to use them.
I see lots of photos, but I can’t tell the real ones from fake ones. Some are real sure, some are people with buyers remorse looking to get their money back, some just want attention. Lots of photos though look like somebody mangled the ends with a screwdriver.
TaintedSquirrel
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Flogger23m
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How? Plugging in a cable should be fool proof. How many of the old 8 PIN connectors would melt? Not many. Of course it happened, but it seems to be far more common with the 4090 than anything in the past 10+ years. If the chances of the cable burning up increased by 900%, then that is far from an ideal design.
Seems like a like of faulty or out of spec cables and converters were supplied. With luck that is all it will be and it would be an easy fix to include new cables going forward.
Niner21
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Again I'm not sticking up for Nvidia, just going by my experience. This connector is not like the eight pin connectors as I stated so you need to be more careful while plugging it in to make sure it's fully seated. Is the new connector the best idea Nvidia has ever had? No. A lot of people, including myself, have had our cards for a while now and no issues.
DooKey
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Yep, I had no problems with the adapter and I'm now using a native PSU cable. I just insured I plugged it in till I heard a click and made sure not to bend it at the connector.
ZeroBarrier
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Why does the outside of that corner look burned but not the inside? Did that person take a lighter to it? Quite a few of these pictures are showing up looking like self inflicted damage.
Niner21
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I'm starting to think a few of these are not totally legit findings. It would be nice to see pictures of the card running with how their cable was configured in their case and then an after photo with the plug itself after it was unplugged.
^ Yeah reading the a few datasheets for ATX connectors the melting point is >100c (assuming the 4090 power adapter uses similar plastic). Checked the side of my 4090 power connector with infrared thermometer I'm seeing at most 40c during 445w load (3dmark timespy). However, I'm using a 117fps limiter for G-sync and seeing avg 300-350w load so I'm probably using lower than avg board power than most.
We won't know - or at least won't have a better idea - how common it legitimately may have been until some more time goes by and we have the benefit of hindsight, because we're still in the eye of the hysteria storm and some percentage of these "reports" are just kids on reddit seeing it as an opportunity to FUD bandwagon. That the topic is absolute heroin for all the youtubers and bloggers that rely on traffic for ad revenue is only compounding it.
Meantime, tech reviewers and anyone else trying to independently reproduce the "melting connector" idea is struggling to do so. We'll see.
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GoldenTiger
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Hearing 100k rtx 4090 shipped, we've seen how many incidents of connectors "melting" out of that? It's practically a nonissue right now in my opinion.
https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/nvidia-produced-over-100-000-rtx-4090-units-thus-far.445331/
Flogger23m
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Fair enough. But I've bent my old 8 PIN connectors heavily in the past for cable routing purposes, and sometimes they weren't fully snapped in when I open my PC. Seems like these new things are more likely to have a problem.
I am hoping it is just a quality control issue, on a smaller scale. That would be an easy fix.
nvidia is the only one using it and selling their hardware. So yea they should atleast step the f up and make a comment lmao.
GoldenTiger
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Sooooo something with maybe a 0.1% incidence rate requires a rapid response without much investigation done yet? They're not going to admit fault and offer any help unless it's extremely common. I'm not convinced it is.
Even then, they never apologized for the (in my opinion) false marketing on the gtx 970 and that was a 100 percent incidence rate.
sfsuphysics
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Well for one, this melting/burning that is occurring is almost 100% not due to thermal issues with running current through those connectors, so all these videos showing FLIR images and what not aren't going to give you any answers i.e. "it makes too much heat and is melting plastic". When you get melting like this it's due to arcing, when electrons jump through the air from one conductor to another (aka arcing) it's going to cause areas that can be two orders of magnitude hotter in temperature i.e. more than sufficient enough to melt the plastics these things are made of. Now on an image like one here it could be due to the female side of the connector somewhere inside the socket, but you should also see damage inside the socket too which not many of these seem to be showing off.
Now the 64 dollar question is how would the arcing happen? Well if there is dissimilar metals in the conductors thermal variations may cause them to expand just enough to create arc areas, especially if the conductors inside have sharp corners, this could be temperature related due to high current. If there's any sort of pinch or pull of the conductor due to cable bending that could also create gaps that allow this. Or yeah this could be self inflected damage to gain attention, get an easy RMA, etc.
That said, while I'm sure some of these are in fact "self inflicted" I feel there are too many instances for them all to be self inflicted. But all these clicks for dollars videos like JayzClicksToo really aren't understanding what could be damaging these connectors by showing a video of them recording in IR the connector, you're not going to see it get so hot that it melts plastic, hell you won't even be lucky enough to catch an arc of current zapping because it'll be very fast and it's under the plastic, only if it gets so hot that it starts melting will you actually see a spike in temperature.
Hmm. Let’s say it’s self inflicted. But I highly doubt people are doing it for easy RMA for the kicks of it.