Thursday, February 8th 2024
CPSC Demands a Recall of CableMod GPU Angled Adapters, Estimates $74.5K of Damaged Property
CableMod issued a statement—just before the last Christmas holiday—detailing a safety recall of 16-pin 12VHPWR angled adapters, version 1.0 and 1.1. This announcement received widespread media coverage (at least in tech circles), but some unfortunate customers have not yet received the memo about faulty adapters—CableMod's 90° angled and 180° hard connectors can overheat and in worst case scenarios, actually melt. HotHardware, amusingly named given this context, was the first hardware news outlet to notice that the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) had published a "GPU Angled Adapter" recall notice to its website earlier today, under "Recall number 24-112."
The US government body's listing outlines aforementioned hazardous conditions, along with an estimated 25,300 affected unit count. The CPSC's recommended "Remedy" advice is as follows: "Consumers should immediately stop using the recalled angled adapters and contact CableMod for instructions on how to safely remove their adapter from the GPU and for a full refund, including cost of shipping, or a $60 store credit for non-customized products, with free standard shipping. Consumers will be asked to destroy the adapter and upload a photo of the destroyed product to cablemod.com/adapterrecall/. The instructions on how to safely remove the adapter are also located on that site. Once destroyed, consumers should discard the adapter in accordance with local laws." The Safety Commission has gathered some customer feedback intelligence on this matter: "The firm (CableMod Ltd., of China) has received 272 reports of the adapters becoming loose, overheating and melting into the GPU, with at least $74,500 in property damage claims in the United States. No injuries have been reported."
HotHardware believes that the recall of faulty CableMod parts will not absolve every owner of flagship Ada Lovelace graphics cards from experiencing scary + melty incidents: "Interestingly enough, YouTuber Northridgefix also posted videos on various GeForce RTX 4090 GPUs that have had issues with damage. While this may or may not be related to any potential adapters, it surely adds to the perceived issues at hand. This makes owners of these GPUs want to double check their expensive piece of hardware more frequently out of caution, even if incidence rates are low."
Sources:
CPSC, Hot Hardware News, VideoCardz
The US government body's listing outlines aforementioned hazardous conditions, along with an estimated 25,300 affected unit count. The CPSC's recommended "Remedy" advice is as follows: "Consumers should immediately stop using the recalled angled adapters and contact CableMod for instructions on how to safely remove their adapter from the GPU and for a full refund, including cost of shipping, or a $60 store credit for non-customized products, with free standard shipping. Consumers will be asked to destroy the adapter and upload a photo of the destroyed product to cablemod.com/adapterrecall/. The instructions on how to safely remove the adapter are also located on that site. Once destroyed, consumers should discard the adapter in accordance with local laws." The Safety Commission has gathered some customer feedback intelligence on this matter: "The firm (CableMod Ltd., of China) has received 272 reports of the adapters becoming loose, overheating and melting into the GPU, with at least $74,500 in property damage claims in the United States. No injuries have been reported."
63 Comments on CPSC Demands a Recall of CableMod GPU Angled Adapters, Estimates $74.5K of Damaged Property
What isn’t part of life and a more recent phenomenon is outright denial by brand loyalists and their rage when anyone points out that hey this might not be a good idea.
This is not Nvidia’s first screw up and it won’t be their last. Hell it wasn’t even that bad of a screw up and few out of the whole were affected. So what’s the big deal in calling them out and asking them to do better in the future?
These are not the days where you had to set jumpers, IRQs, master and slave drives, and all sorts of other stuff. Building computers is now Lego blocks level simple. It's been getting easier and easier since the get go. It's idiot proof to the point where the part of building a PC today that consumes the most brain cells is how to configure your RGB. That's not a bad thing. Nobody wants to go back to the dark days. But the problem with this is if you idiot proof something, and then due to a screw up something is not idiot proof you're going to have a shit show.
That's fine and that happens all the time in all sorts of things. But there is a strong tendency among PC Gamers to blame everything and everyone but PC Gamers. It's snowflakery.
Same as i've said before, I feel for any Nvidia users who had the connector fail and damage their card. Spending thousands of dollars on a high-end product only for a cheap cable/connector to destroy has got to be infuriating. With any luck the next generation connector is more robust.
That isn't actually a problem with the spec itself though. And nor does it make this a highly widespread issue as claimed.
In contrast the micro fit in general only goes up to 8.5A per line (can't find a specific spec for pcie from a good source), so what exactly did we gain beside a much more expensive and harder to implement connector? Some board space?That doesn't make it better. We traded something cheap and reliable, with a huge ammount of headroom for something more expensive, harder to manufacture and running full tilt with no margin whatsoever. All so we could save the space of a single connector, which ammounts to about less than 1% the total size of a gpu. Who in their right mind made this stupid ass decision!?
Honestly its not a big deal to me either way. Used both. Slightly prefer 12VHPWR vs 3xPCIex8 but no biggie either way. Never had an issue with several adapters and native psu connectors.
These where required back in the days running a 9700 Pro or so.
Abandon above cable.. Go back to 8 pins. Much more solid, robust.
Looking at Amazon reviews though, 20% are 1-star reviews right off the bat....so they better get ready with everything: marketing, PR, etc... to handle the wave.
Its really that simple.
Also, what is 'widespread'.. I think seeing repeated instances is enough to call it that, but apparently you do not. So its only an issue if they catch fire left and right? I beg to differ... it should simply be impossible to fail so catastrophically.
Like I said, 288 was worst-case using the lowest possible values, ie the lower molex 8A per line, the smaller AWG18 cabling rather than AWG16 that is recommended but not always used, and then additional concerns about daisy-chained PCIe cables coming from the PSU itself.
288W per 6+2 pin connector already includes a massive safety margin, it's rare that a 13A Molex with AWG16 would struggle to achieve double that and still have the same safety margin.
I'm not seeing that safety margin on 12VHPWR and when it melts people are blaming the adapters, the bend radius, the manufacturing quality... Nope - it's that the design itself has no safety margin at all. You can look up the temperature delta on stranded cable of any given size, Molex have similar exact specs of what temperatures their connectors will get at any given current - this is all in the public domain and no secret.
Other things I compare this sort of stuff with are normal wall sockets/plugs. Yet another example of something heavily overbuilt in terms of tolerances, because it was built with the knowledge that a lot of stupid people are going to screw around with it. That really is the expectation I have when it comes to consumer grade electrics. And even here, if you look across the globe, there are marked differences in the quality of these systems between countries/continents. In this area, I really do expect something as perfect as it can get.
Btw: *Two connectors for 600W.
Yeah another interesting point. We're already up to two plugs on the first gen they're introduced. Let's gooo
12VHPWR should have just kept MiniFit Jr but ditched all the sense wires to make the connector smaller than two 8-pins and also mandated the Molex 13A connectors. Without changing anything dramatic, a 10-pin, hypothetical 12VHPWR done properly could carry 406W with the exact same safety margins as the existing 6+2pin PCIe connectors, rather than the total absence of safety margins in the original 12VHPWR.
Like I said, I don't want a future where we need half a Kilowatt for a single GPU, but there's a lot of room to expand pin-count using MiniFit Jr before we get to 20+4 pin connectors like on motherboards.
Intel and Nvidia are just creating a spec that's violates the manufacturers guidelines right out of the gate and everyone's wondering why there are problems.
However.....some of the things I noticed in the documentation.
[INDENT]
- The connector is rate for an operational power of 600 watts max nothing more.
- However they say there is the possibilty of drawing 9.5 Amps per pin (so you would expect 6 12v 6 Ground pins) which actually maths out at 684 watts. Also this is at 12VDC nothing more. Your PSU doesnt output at LEAST 12V on that rail especially under vDroop? Well your actually only rated for less power now.
- It is only rated for 600 watt of power draw from -40 to 105 degrees with no mention of derate due to temperatures that you would expect.
- All testing will be accomplished at 25 -+5 degrees celsius.
[/INDENT]Just some areas that make me dubious at the overall ratings.
You want to quit bullshitting?Nvm, I need to quit playing electrical pretendo-engineer. Stuff below is invalid math as discussed below.
www.molex.com/content/dam/molex/molex-dot-com/products/automated/en-us/productspecificationpdf/430/43045/PS-43045-001.pdf?inline
Do your own wattage math. With 18AWG wire the 12pin connector is capable of 12v*5.5a*12pins or 792W. They just need to build it to spec. Heck, even 20AWG makes it to 642W.