After the publication on Reddit of the testimony of two users concerned, Nvidia decided to investigate the overheating problems of the 16 pin adapter of the RTX 4090. The manufacturer claims to have contacted the affected owners.
We mentioned it in our columns this Monday, October 24, 2022. As you may know, two RTX 4090 owners recounted their misadventure with Nvidia’s latest GPU on Reddit. First user reggie-gakil posted a picture of the new 16 pin 12VHPWR adapter totally burnt out. You could see that the connection on the board itself was damaged and had melted in some places.
Following the publication of this testimony, a second user raised similar issues on Reddit. For him too, he noticed that the adapter had been damaged during his gaming session on Black Desert.
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Nvidia investigates overheating issues
As you can imagine, these two stories made the rounds of the web and were picked up by many specialized media. Faced with the emerging controversy, Nvidia has decided to speak officially. “We are investigating the reports. We are in contact with the first owner and will contact the other for additional information.” assured Bryan Del Rizzo, spokesperson for the green team, to our colleagues from The Verge.
Recall that Nvidia initially adopted this new 16-pin power connector on the RTX 3090 Ti. With the RTX 4090s, the cable has become a standard and it is supplied with all the models available on the market. However, these overheating cases suggest that this 12VHPWR connector, originally designed for the new ATX 3.0 power supplies, could cause problems if bent in a certain way.
Indeed, the CableMod media recently clarified in an article “that by bending the cable too close to the connector, some terminals could come loose or become misaligned in the connector itself. This can cause an uneven load on other wires, increasing the risk of damage from overheating.” The site recommends in particular not to bend a connector vertically or horizontally, but rather to respect a minimum distance of 35 mm from the connector before bending.
Note that in early September 2022, the PCI-SIG consortium, responsible in particular for specifying the Peripheral Component Interconnect, PCI-X and PCI Express computer buses, stated that certain implementations of the 12VHPWR connector “exhibited thermal variance, which could lead to safety issues under certain conditions.”