It's happening again, melting 12v high pwr connectors

[RGAFL]

Story on Tom's Hardware of a 5080 having a melted cable at the PSU end.

 

[lilhasselhoffer]

You call low single digit % or less failure rate "relatively often"?

In my opinion, 95% of all melting issues have been caused by stiff adaptors or cables squished in limited space - mostly by side panels, in some cases by people trying to build unreasonably small computers, exerting force on the plug and deforming metal contacts inside.

The biggest problem may not be the socket itself, but its placement. Had all these sockets been placed on the opposite side of the video outputs facing downwards, 80% meltings would have never happened.

Let me explain this in a way anyone with a brain capable of engineering should understand.

1% failure rates are stupid high. If 1% of the 283,400,986 vehicles registered in the US were to fail catastrophically like this it'd be 2,834,010 cars. 2.8 million cars catching on fire for only a 1% rate of failure.
This is why things like PPAP exist. They use an RPN value to represent its weight. This RPN is just the likelihood of a failure (1-10), multiplied by the rate of failure (1-10), and the severity of the failure (1-10). Note that this failure, assuming only 1% rate, would be:
10 - Hazardous without warning on Severity
6 - North of 1 in 400, but close to 1 in 80.
10 - Detection is almost impossible...because you have customers having these fail.
RPN = 600.

What's the significance? Well, you have to have fixes in-place for automotive for anything that is north of 100. The severity is a 10 unless failure mode changes. That means rate and detection have to be less than 10 when multiplied...and the detection means either a complete restructure, or it cannot go below 10...which means the allowable occurrence rating would be 1, or 1 in 1,500,000 unit. Something that literally might not exist yet given limited inventory.


Maybe you get it, maybe not. Your engineers either sucked at design, sucked at specifications, or both. Manufacturing may have failed...but if that was the case you'd see strings of failures instead of incidence with differing hardware. Cool. The specification was designed in a vacuum, tested by techs, and not given real world application a concern. A 600 RPN basically means Nvidia was filled with a bunch of arrogant idiots, who couldn't put forward either the money to design the hardware better, or overspecify the connectors to magically deal with their shenanigans. Put this mushy dough ball back into the oven, it ain't done cookin' yet.



Oh, but all of this is thoroughly tested, and it's all user error. Right? I mean, that's what the rant was about. You seem like the engineering type to have to huff this much copium to explain the failures, when the explanation by Occam's razor is simply that they didn't test with a user in-mind, and arrogantly believed that their designs would work. Not the first time mere humans have made mistakes...the difference is whether or not you can accept that failure. If you cannot, because it must be something other than perfect design, I'll point you in the direction of about a dozen different podcast accounting for hundreds of errors that "would have worked" if the pesky influence of reality just stopped interfering.

 

[qxp]

Let me explain this in a way anyone with a brain capable of engineering should understand.

1% failure rates are stupid high. If 1% of the 283,400,986 vehicles registered in the US were to fail catastrophically like this it'd be 2,834,010 cars. 2.8 million cars catching on fire for only a 1% rate of failure.
This is why things like PPAP exist. They use an RPN value to represent its weight. This RPN is just the likelihood of a failure (1-10), multiplied by the rate of failure (1-10), and the severity of the failure (1-10). Note that this failure, assuming only 1% rate, would be:
10 - Hazardous without warning on Severity
6 - North of 1 in 400, but close to 1 in 80.
10 - Detection is almost impossible...because you have customers having these fail.
RPN = 600.

Spot on !

What's the significance? Well, you have to have fixes in-place for automotive for anything that is north of 100. The severity is a 10 unless failure mode changes. That means rate and detection have to be less than 10 when multiplied...and the detection means either a complete restructure, or it cannot go below 10...which means the allowable occurrence rating would be 1, or 1 in 1,500,000 unit. Something that literally might not exist yet given limited inventory.


Maybe you get it, maybe not. Your engineers either sucked at design, sucked at specifications, or both. Manufacturing may have failed...but if that was the case you'd see strings of failures instead of incidence with differing hardware. Cool. The specification was designed in a vacuum, tested by techs, and not given real world application a concern. A 600 RPN basically means Nvidia was filled with a bunch of arrogant idiots, who couldn't put forward either the money to design the hardware better, or overspecify the connectors to magically deal with their shenanigans. Put this mushy dough ball back into the oven, it ain't done cookin' yet.

Actually, it looks like the oversight was in not knowing the physics of contacts and cables. Something that is too easy to take for granted - you just plug it in and it works, what could go wrong? Of course, the reason that it works is the result of decades of engineering that people are starting to forget.

 

[Endymio]

Let me explain this in a way anyone with a brain capable of engineering should understand. 1% failure rates are stupid high. If 1% of the 283,400,986 vehicles registered in the US were to fail catastrophically like this it'd be 2,834,010 cars

Oops! How embarrassing for you then to learn that the US averages 41 million cars recalled per year -- nearly half a billion vehicles in the last decade alone:

Car Recall Facts and Statistics 2025

www.autoinsurance.com

Not all these were "catastrophic" failures, of course -- but serious enough to threaten death or serious injury. I think I'll take melted, easily-replaced power cable over my brakes failing at a critical moment.

 

[kapone32]

Look at the packing slip I posted. Please pay attention to my posts when responding, it’s rude to make someone repeat themselves.


You don’t think anyone in r/Alienware reports on their repairs? Go take a look.



I believe your faux outrage is because you can’t understand that other people don’t have the same priorities as you do. I am perfectly capable of building a PC and I’ve built thousands upon thousands of them in my much younger years. At this point in my life I have other things to take up my time that are more important to me. My time is more valuable than the effort It takes plugging parts into a board.

And the above doesn’t even consider the fact that you can get a quality prebuilt for less than you can buy the parts for. As an example I’ve already posted in the past what I paid for my 4090. It was below list price. How about that 4TB WD 850 black? $100 less than the best PC parts picker price.

PCs and gaming are my hobbies besides my career. Assembling a PC is just as boring as assembling IKEA furniture. I have no interest in it all, just like you can be a car enthusiast without building your own car.

You have built thousands of PCs when you were young? During Covid prebuilts were cheaper. The WD 850X is $864 for the 8TB version right now that is $604 US dollars. This is so counter to what TPU stands for. I am not saying if you want a prebuilt you are doing ti wrong. All I am saying is making it seem like it is somehow better in a World of Mcaaffe and whatever bloatware comes with them. Unless you are talking about an SI like Falcon Northwest that is in no way cheaper than buying parts individually.

 

[lilhasselhoffer]

Oops! How embarrassing for you then to learn that the US averages 41 million cars recalled per year -- nearly half a billion vehicles in the last decade alone:

Car Recall Facts and Statistics 2025

www.autoinsurance.com

Not all these were "catastrophic" failures, of course -- but serious enough to threaten death or serious injury. I think I'll take melted, easily-replaced power cable over my brakes failing at a critical moment.

You...might not understand this, but a recall is not an incidence of failure. It's a manufacturer detecting that there is a high enough likelihood of failure that replacing the item is financially preferable to allowing the regular rate of failure to happen (for non-dangerous items). For dangerous stuff a recall cynically exists when the cost of lawsuits is too high, and optimistically is done the second there's a practical chance of harming the consumer. There are recalls for airbags, switches, etc... They are not recalling 2.8 million cars for "explosions during regular operation." If they would, then it'd be a huge news story.

Let me put this into perspective. No recalls from Nvidia... No recalls from PSU manufacturers... There are plenty of PSUs being recalled for other things, and the Nvidia GPUs are basically unobtanium. The last 12 volt high power recall took weeks of demonstrating before recalls were issued, and it required a relatively quiet redesign in 2023 to theoretically solve that issue. I say theoretically because it's happening again, which implies that it did not fix the issue in practice.


I...do think it's funny that your logic equates recalls to everything...whereas this is a specific failure mode and therefore like trying to look at all of the trees and extrapolate from the entire set of defects the patterns only available in oak trees...but I'm going to be real here. I could write a ten paragraph breakdown accurately describing this from the perspective of someone who does this daily...and nobody will read it. For most people, 2.8 million cars exploding is more than enough common sense to justify why "a couple of percentages of failure" is such a stupid thing to say with a failure mode this big. If it was the failure of paint to be within 2 dE (and thus considered visually the same constant color) we'd have a different discussion, but stuff that effectively causes bodily and property damage is something you cannot just say "low enough" and ignore. Especially not when you have presumably thousands on the market.


-Edit-
To clarify, melting power cables is not the "low issue" you seem to pretend. You also admit openly that recalls are nowhere near as prevalent for thing that actually cause damage.

In 2022 there were 374,000 house fires. There were 3,790 deaths from those fires. Let's say 1 in 1,000 of those house fires might be due to computer components/electrical. 1 in 1,000 is the death rate. 1% is the rate of failure for the cards. How many cards until you kill somebody? 1/1000 * 1/1000 * 1/100 = 1/100,000,000. In 2024 Nvidia shipped 32 million GPUs. That's just a thought experiment using easy math...because I don't have a mountain of data, and am giving them 1% failure rates as a courtesy. It takes one person shooting another to go to jail, for manslaughter or murder. You're saying Nvidia should go to jail about 1 times per 3 years in this theoretical example?

Yes. If the engineer of record pulled this trick it would be the same as blaming the company who made a gun for somebody killing another person with it...and it's why being the engineer of record on stuff like this is as important as it is...and why car companies do these sort of recalls to prevent being sued for knowingly being responsible for killing people. If you don't believe me, go out and ask professional architects what the importance is of them signing off on things.


This may not seem as significant to most people as I'm portraying it...but the short of it is that either the engineers who designed the plug did not actually account for their users, or the GPUs pulling 900 watts over a rated 600 watt interface (because it was cheaper than having so many 8 pin connectors on the card) have to come clean. I don't care who does, but all of this is precipitated on the bass-ackwards notion that all of this was a manufacturing defect and Nvidia tested it, followed by blaming user error. Cool...but if you're going down that route with no investigation then you've started this conversation as a bad-faith investigator with a bias so obvious it can be seen from space.
-Edit end-

 

[bitsandboots]

...I am perfectly capable of building a PC and I’ve built thousands upon thousands of them in my much younger years. At this point in my life I have other things to take up my time that are more important to me. My time is more valuable than the effort It takes plugging parts into a board...

PCs and gaming are my hobbies besides my career. Assembling a PC is just as boring as assembling IKEA furniture. I have no interest in it all, just like you can be a car enthusiast without building your own car.

Not that I have been following the conversation chain but this post is just too rich not to comment on.
Someone who apparently has built enough PCs to have been on the factory line, sure understandable you wouldn't want to ever build a PC again.
But then to say your time is more important than the hour it takes to assemble a computer is contradictory to the time you've spent on TPU in the past day alone. Don't pretend your time is valuable if you're spending it arguing on forums.

 

[Bomby569]

You...might not understand this, but a recall is not an incidence of failure. It's a manufacturer detecting that there is a high enough likelihood of failure that replacing the item is financially preferable to allowing the regular rate of failure to happen (for non-dangerous items). For dangerous stuff a recall cynically exists when the cost of lawsuits is too high, and optimistically is done the second there's a practical chance of harming the consumer. There are recalls for airbags, switches, etc... They are not recalling 2.8 million cars for "explosions during regular operation." If they would, then it'd be a huge news story.

I'm no expert but not sure this is correct, the manufacturer can decide on a recall sure that's true, but it can also have no alternative and a recall may be imposed on them by a regulatory agency. Recalls aren't all result of a profit and lose calculation, that would be chaos and the wild west.

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

To me its pretty evident this standard sucks ballz. There should be no situation in which a GPU can demand 3x the safe power limit of a wire. If there is poor contact, power draw should be reduced until the error is corrected. The fact a properly seated cable can still fail is atrocious.

Oops! How embarrassing for you then to learn that the US averages 41 million cars recalled per year -- nearly half a billion vehicles in the last decade alone:

Car Recall Facts and Statistics 2025

www.autoinsurance.com

Not all these were "catastrophic" failures, of course -- but serious enough to threaten death or serious injury. I think I'll take melted, easily-replaced power cable over my brakes failing at a critical moment.

Talk about throwing egg at your own face.....

Many recalls are issued after failures in the single digits. Hyundai recalled the santa cruz wiring harness after a SINGLE fire.

So if they're recalling for 0.000001% failure rates, why on earth is nvidia not recalling for this fire issue? Sure looks like the automotive industry is being a lot more responsible then the PC industry is.....

 

[pavle]

An ex-Intel engineer has reportedly said (videocardz.com) that nvidia is not using this connector properly - no shunts to measure per-wire current (ASUS has them) and that the connector should only be for up to 375W for safe operation. That aligns with my speculations of 600/2.

 

[Dredi]

no shunts to measure per-wire current (ASUS has them)

Asus has them on one SKU, not across the lineup.

 

[neatfeatguy]

Oops! How embarrassing for you then to learn that the US averages 41 million cars recalled per year -- nearly half a billion vehicles in the last decade alone:

Car Recall Facts and Statistics 2025

www.autoinsurance.com

Not all these were "catastrophic" failures, of course -- but serious enough to threaten death or serious injury. I think I'll take melted, easily-replaced power cable over my brakes failing at a critical moment.

Fight Club taught us:

If A x B x C = X and if X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.

Nvidia knows what it is doing.

 

[JAS_design]

The "Minitek Pwr CEM-5 PCIe" connectors are basically identical to the "Minitek Pwr 3.0 High Current" connectors Amphenol also produce. They both use the same SKU of HCS crimp terminals and everything. The only real difference is the addition of the four sense pins on the connector housing.

The Pwr 3.0 High Current is rated to 7.5A per pin when using 16AWG wire on a 2x6 connector, and only 6.5A when using 18AWG wire. Yet a near-identical connector using the same crimp terminals has been rated for 9.5A on all 12 pins.

As much as NVIDIA and others are responsible for the specification, a big part of me also questions Amphenol deciding their connectors could suddenly handle a far higher current than they'd ever been rated for before. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and say they must have tested it, but even so... their reputation is also on the line here.

It's hard to argue that the connectors are being misused when even Amphenol has rated them to be used in this way.

 

[Sound_Card]

I have not read the entire thread, but if the info indeed came from Nvidia subreddit, you can safely throw it in the trash. That might be the dumbest forum of all tech sites. Probably nothing is happening at all.

 

[JustBenching]

To me its pretty evident this standard sucks ballz. There should be no situation in which a GPU can demand 3x the safe power limit of a wire.

Then the 8pin also sucks ballz, since an 8pin can't power a 5090. That's why you add more than 1. Apply the same to the 12vh, it's not the cable that's the issue, it's that they don't add 2 of them (like HOF does).

 

[Bomby569]

Then the 8pin also sucks ballz, since an 8pin can't power a 5090. That's why you add more than 1. Apply the same to the 12vh, it's not the cable that's the issue, it's that they don't add 2 of them (like HOF does).

if the card can't balance the load i guess adding another cable could split the load in two wires at least (unless the 2 cables were seen as one by the gpu but that doesn't seem logic.... but Nvidia is not using logic, so... who knows but i digress), one in each cable, but that also wouldn't fix the main issue. You can try to minimise damage but the cable is not the issue.

 

[Vayra86]

The "Minitek Pwr CEM-5 PCIe" connectors are basically identical to the "Minitek Pwr 3.0 High Current" connectors Amphenol also produce. They both use the same SKU of HCS crimp terminals and everything. The only real difference is the addition of the four sense pins on the connector housing.

The Pwr 3.0 High Current is rated to 7.5A per pin when using 16AWG wire on a 2x6 connector, and only 6.5A when using 18AWG wire. Yet a near-identical connector using the same crimp terminals has been rated for 9.5A on all 12 pins.

As much as NVIDIA and others are responsible for the specification, a big part of me also questions Amphenol deciding their connectors could suddenly handle a far higher current than they'd ever been rated for before. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and say they must have tested it, but even so... their reputation is also on the line here.

It's hard to argue that the connectors are being misused when even Amphenol has rated them to be used in this way.

True although 9,5 still isnt 23

 

[Assimilator]

All the below is incorrect because it's based on an incomplete understanding of the spec, thanks to @wNotyarD for correcting me!

The Pwr 3.0 High Current is rated to 7.5A per pin when using 16AWG wire on a 2x6 connector, and only 6.5A when using 18AWG wire.

Where are you getting this information? According to Amphenol's own site, the Pwr 3.0 High Current Connector is rated for up to 12A per contact up to 20AWG; the 9.5A spec on the Pwr CEM-5 PCIe is therefore a downrating. With 600W maximum draw than they could even have got away with 8.5A/contact.

And based on this, the lower safety factor being claimed by many is incorrect. If we assume that CEM-5/CEM-5.1 is actually capable of 12A, that's 864W, which against 600W of maximum draw gives a SF of 1.44 as opposed to 1.14 if we use 9.5A/684W. Yeah, it's not the 1.92 of the 6- or 8-pin, but it is more than 25% better than the 9.5A SF.

 

[LittleBro]

Then the 8pin also sucks ballz, since an 8pin can't power a 5090. That's why you add more than 1. Apply the same to the 12vh, it's not the cable that's the issue, it's that they don't add 2 of them (like HOF does).

No, 8pin does not suck at all. For single ATX 8pin connector no one has ever specified to be used to power up anything above 150W (though it could theoretically safely handle +50-75W more). On the other hand, 2x6pin connector was specified to be capable of handling power up to 600W. So given the specification, why would they double the 12pin connector count when one is enough?

Not a connector count is problem, rather specification/design sucks. Adding another incorrectly designed connector does not equal halving the current that goes through single one. Based on Ohm's law, current transferred through multiple connectors (wires) will be evenly split between those connectors ONLY when all connectors have equal resistance. Since the current takes path of least resistance, even with 2 incorrectly designed connectors you might end up with uneven current distribution which can be still potentially dangerous. There is a chance for at least one pin to trasfer more than max. rated current. With such connector design only load balancing could help.

 

[wNotyarD]

Where are you getting this information? According to Amphenol's own site, the Pwr 3.0 High Current Connector is rated for up to 12A per contact up to 20AWG

That's for two pins with 16 AWG. If you open the product specifications on the PWR 3.0 HCC, you'll find the following tables:

So the CEM-5 is actually an upgrade at 12 energized pins.

 

[dirtyferret]

But wait..

Have you tried silk boxers?

They were a thing in the 90s lol..

I owned a pair (or two) back then!

 

[BlueBee]

Fight Club taught us:

If A x B x C = X and if X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.

Nvidia knows what it is doing.

Whoh, remember the first rule

 

[Assimilator]

That's for two pins with 16 AWG. If you open the product specifications on the PWR 3.0 HCC, you'll find the following tables:
View attachment 384700

So the CEM-5 is actually an upgrade at 12 energized pins.

Thanks for that - have corrected my post. Yeah, it does seem strange to arbitrarily uprate a contact by 2A, which is a >25% boost in this case...

 

[JustBenching]

So given the specification, why would they double the 12pin connector count when one is enough?

Because someone complained that the card spikes to 900 watts.

 

[wNotyarD]

Thanks for that - have corrected my post. Yeah, it does seem strange to arbitrarily uprate a contact by 2A, which is a >25% boost in this case...

Also, I found this particular interesting bit on the CEM-5 connector specs:

So much for our fellow here saying the connector is good for a single cycle only. But it certainly doesn't look reliable for reviewers' usage at face value.