Customers report melting 16-pin RTX 4090 energy adapters, once more


Right here we go once more: Half a yr after Nvidia’s final official assertion relating to broken RTX 4090 cable adapters, new instances point out the issue hasn’t light. The blame has been handed between Nvidia, consumer error, and the specification writer. Switching to ATX 3.0 energy provides continues to be the most secure guess.

At the least three new reviews of melting 16-pin adapters for Nvidia’s flagship GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card appeared on Reddit this week. The complaints may sign one thing continues to be flawed with the connectors six months after the controversy emerged.

The issues began in October when a number of 4090 homeowners stated their energy cables had burned or melted. In November, Nvidia acknowledged 50 instances worldwide, saying the customers had improperly related the adapters. Nonetheless, Igor’s Lab questioned the soldering high quality of the equipped adapters. One consumer opened a class-action lawsuit towards Crew Inexperienced, and AMD took the chance to take a jab at its competitor in a vacation tweet final yr (under).

The RTX 4090 makes use of 16-pin 12VHPWR connectors and natively helps ATX 3.0 energy provides. Customers who do not wish to spend further to improve from their ATX 2.0 PSUs can use the bundled adapters on their 8-pin connectors.

One of many new incidents occurred after round six months of use. The consumer claims to have set the connectors appropriately and securely. Equally, a second consumer claims his properly-connected adapter went up in smoke about six or seven months after set up. The consumer primarily used the PC to coach AI fashions reasonably than play video games. A peculiar facet of the second report is that the affected PC accommodates a second RTX 4090 that hasn’t skilled any issues.

A 3rd report comes from somebody utilizing a third-party Corsair SF750 platinum adapter. Assuming it was appropriately related, this occasion may recommend that the adapter is not the issue. Even stranger is that the consumer restricted the GPU to 70 % energy and paired it with a modest Ryzen 7600 CPU, so the PSU definitely wasn’t overtaxed.

Reviews of 4090 connectors melting or burning in ATX 3.0 provides have not appeared. So one of the best safeguard towards the difficulty might be to keep away from utilizing any adapter and easily improve to an ATX 3.0 PSU, which most likely would not price a lot further in comparison with the $1,600 graphics card. Those that cannot keep away from utilizing the adapters can examine the standing of their 16-pin reference to a brand new characteristic in GPU-Z.


Peter Johnson