Melting 12VHPWR Connectors Continues To Haunt RTX 4090 Owners One Year On
Melting 12VHPWR Connectors Continues To Haunt RTX 4090 Owners One Year On
The 12VHPWR debacle seems like a never-ending saga for NVIDIA’s RTX 4090 owners as reports of the melting connectors had initially dominated the conversation upon the GPU’s launch one year ago. While most of it is largely subsided as various parties are looking to improve the design, the owners of RTX 4090 still had to contend with an arguably flawed connector potentially combusting their prized possessions.
That is what happened to this particular Reddit user who owns the ASUS TUF RTX 4090, the card had worked for a year prior to its untimely death. While this seemingly looks like the exception rather than the norm right now, it’s not exactly reassuring for all the RTX 4090 out there as there are various ways to cause the connector to eventually fail – when the connector gets unseated enough at a perfect spot to cause high electrical resistance, thus producing extreme heat that melts the connector’s plastic housing.
The user noted that the melted connector is a stock NVIDIA PCIe-to-12VHPWR adapter that comes in-box (presumably from the ASUS’s GPU packaging), and we know some of them uses a slightly different copper contacts that are more prone to melting. That being said, the connector’s rather unwieldy connecting mechanism, which some users noted that detecting a “click” can be difficult, isn’t helping the case here (and a tensioned PSU cable could unseat the cable ever so slightly).
Since the 12VHPWR’s issues, there have been attempts to redesign or at least iterate on the connector so it can safely deliver 600W of power to these power-hungry GPUs. Among those are the improved 12V2x6, and ASUS are looking into a “connector-less” design that utilizes the HPCE connector from datacenter environments. It’s been said that NVIDIA has been quietly updating the connector design on the subsequent batches of RTX 40 GPUs, but since no recall was made to the original units – these models are still out there in the wild, with no way of telling them apart (aside from serial numbers).
Source: Tom’s Hardware
Pokdepinion: That’s rather concerning for RTX 4090 owners out there. Should there be a formal recall?
