RTX 4000 series burning cables thread

[The red spirit]

Honestly I think this whole affair and the massive gap between x90 and lower cards is going to inspire a pull/delay of further ADA GPUs.

They'll ride out Ampere and refresh their shit first. Now we know why they staggered it like this... apparently this was a gamble, all the way, and AMD is slowly but certainly showing that it will meet raster performance without a problem. They already pulled a 4080... writing's on the wall.

I mean what have they got, apart from massively undercutting on price compared to Ampere? Perf/watt improvements and DLSS3. That's absolutely worthless without a major price cut. This, alongside Turing and Ampere, is yet another gen where I really don't feel any pull to jump on their new features. Its just not worth all the hassle nor the price.

So far it seems like the worst launch since GTX 480 so far. The only good thing I can say is that performance is right. Everything else is bad and PR job was completely and utterly awful. First ignoring current societal climate with products, then making 4090 like 60-70% better than the rest of line up, then killing 4080s, then ignoring burning cable issue and then climaxing in denying warranties of that said bad adapter. It's just unprecedented failure after failure and I frankly don't remember nVidia being this utterly incompetent, moronic and also rude at the same time. They had some stinky launches in the past like FX 5950, GTX 480, RTX 2080 Ti, but frankly 4090 launch has been the worst so far. Not to mention that seemingly a lots of techtubers were bribed (sorry, abiding by nV's rules and respectign their totalitarian BS) and published a lot of weak content and constantly said mostly positive things about nVidia. Not to mention that for the first time ever their gamign card "new" architecture is already old. Hopper is already made and it beats Ada by very significant margins, times even and it already ships, but not for gamers. So not only they completely botched their launch, they also try to push already somewhat old technology and imo that just makes their launch feel even worse, because they should have already have everything figured out and kinks worked out, but no, we get some sparky cables, old tech, awful line-up that was unlaunched after bad reputation. It's just so dumb and incompetent, that it makes me question a bit whether nVidia even has what it takes to survive in gaming market, because gaming is still more than half of their profit, despite data center revenue growing so fast and there hasn't been any strong launch since Pascal, that actually sold very well. Most people that use Steam still have Pascal cards, Turing sold okay, meanwhile Ampere has been lukewarm at best. If peopel don't beuy cards, nVidia doesn't have revenue then and there's only so many times when they can botch launches, make crappy products, before they will start hurting and have to be serious or croak. And talking about data center, nVidia doesn't have leadership there so far and despite making big profits there, they have so many competitors which also make good profits, that makes nVidia not unique, lacking moat and basically replaceable, basically lacking value as company. Beside data center and gaming, nVidia is too small in other categories to matter and to survive.

 

[maxfly]

Don't know if this has been posted yet

Adapter gate? NVIDIA briefs all board partners this morning and makes damage an absolute boss issue | igor´sLAB

That this with the faulty 12VHPWR adapter (“must break”), whose investigation I had published this morning as an article and video, will not proceed without noises and a larger wave…

www.igorslab.de

 

[The red spirit]

Don't know if this has been posted yet

Adapter gate? NVIDIA briefs all board partners this morning and makes damage an absolute boss issue | igor´sLAB

That this with the faulty 12VHPWR adapter (“must break”), whose investigation I had published this morning as an article and video, will not proceed without noises and a larger wave…

www.igorslab.de

Literally previous page

 

[ARF]

Cost cutting taken to a new extreme

Overkill heatsink that takes 4 or 5 slots in PC ATX mid tower cases which can barely take the size of this monster, and underengineered power connector and PCB.
Just make the heatsink smaller, undervolt the card and the saved money use for improved power connector/s.

Meanwhile: NVIDIA tells board partners to collect GeForce RTX 4090 cards affected by melting 16-pin power adapter - VideoCardz.com

 

[Tyl3n0L]

I'm really considering of returning my 4090 now tbh... I should have waited for RDNA3 too... This whole debacle on a 2500$ CDN damn video card is stupid and shouldn't exist.

 

[R-T-B]

TL;DR design of adapter is bad, the 12VHPWR standard is fine.

Yep. Igorslab is reputable. It's increasingly looking like nvidia provided adapters have poor durability and design, leading to this.

This would also, ancedotally, explain why my evga manufactured adapter with my 3090 ti has been fine. It has a full 12 wires, as it should.

RTX 4090 is dumpster fire of product that frankly needs a whole recall, redesign and some people fired from management. There are things that have to be fixed:
1) TDP needs to go down to no more than 350 watts and clock speed to be allowed to have more variance, so that there is minimal loss of performance
2) Cooler shrank and perhaps given new aesthetics, because now it just looks like clone of RTX 3080, a much lesser card and this is supposed to be a huge upgrade
3) Power connectors nowadays must all be angled at least 90 degrees, because early 2000s are over and putting a power connector in actually convenient place isn't black magic anymore and it's cheap and makes our life better
4) No more sparky adapters
5) RTX 4090 needs to cost no more than 1400 dollars
6) DP 2.0 is necessity, not an option on your top tier card
7) Nobody cares about 3GHz clock speed in some lab, to be fair, nobody really cares about clock speeds of graphics cards much anyway, it's nearly irrelevant in era of dynamic clock speed and in era, where audience seemingly started to care about perf/watt.
8) Stop being dicks:
https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/yelmyo

I think they could get away with just fixing the adapters but they certainly have to do something about that.

 

[The red spirit]

Yep. Igorslab is reputable. It's increasingly looking like nvidia provided adapters have poor durability and design, leading to this.

This would also, ancedotally, explain why my evga manufactured adapter with my 3090 ti has been fine. It has a full 12 wires, as it should.

I think I posted crmaris's small investigation too. He's reputable, just didn't do a lot of testing.

I think they could get away with just fixing the adapters but they certainly have to do something about that.

Maybe, but I'm genuinely a little bit worried about them in long term. Too many bad decisions and this time it's not just one product or one failure, but a whole cluster of them.

Update, another victim:
https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/yeb9e7

 

[Zyll Goliat]

Overkill heatsink that takes 4 or 5 slots in PC ATX mid tower cases which can barely take the size of this monster, and underengineered power connector and PCB.
Just make the heatsink smaller, undervolt the card and the saved money use for improved power connector/s.

Meanwhile: NVIDIA tells board partners to collect GeForce RTX 4090 cards affected by melting 16-pin power adapter - VideoCardz.com

View attachment 267422

It's not like that they are selling this cards for 200$-300$ so they NEED to save the money in manufactoring process to make the profit......This is their "Premium" product and I bet that Nvidia making at least 1000$+ profit on each sold 4090.......I mean for that MSRP you can literally build a car......

 

[80-watt Hamster]

So what they did, and I'm mentally facepalming pretty hard over here, is take 4 14-ga wires, solder bridge them onto 6 pads, which then lead not to individual contacts but a contact block. Meaning that when one wire loses contact, the GPU has no idea, because they're all merged at the contact block, and will merrily continue to pull all the current through the remaining wires/pads. Who signed off on this?

 

[R-T-B]

So what they did, and I'm mentally facepalming pretty hard over here, is take 4 14-ga wires, solder bridge them onto 6 pads, which then lead not to individual contacts but a contact block. Meaning that when one wire loses contact, the GPU has no idea, because they're all merged at the contact block, and will merrily continue to pull all the current through the remaining wires/pads. Who signed off on this?

View attachment 267448

It is pretty shocking. It makes me wonder if a supplier isn't cheaping out on them, because as you said, it'd be a major no-no to actually approve a design like that.

 

[AnotherReader]

It is pretty shocking. It makes me wonder if a supplier isn't cheaping out on them, because as you said, it'd be a major no-no to actually approve a design like that.

Even it it's a supplier cheaping out, Nvidia should have done due diligence when outsourcing the design of the adapter.

 

[Chomiq]

Glad my advice to future 4090 buyer on TPU was "buy a €20 cable from Seasonic instead of using that ugly octopus adapter". You'd figure an €1800 gpu would come with quality/safe cables.
EVGA boss must be happy he dodged that bullet. Just imagine the response if it was an EVGA card with melted cables.

 

[The red spirit]

Glad my advice to future 4090 buyer on TPU was "buy a €20 cable from Seasonic instead of using that ugly octopus adapter". You'd figure an €1800 gpu would come with quality/safe cables.
EVGA boss must be happy he dodged that bullet. Just imagine the response if it was an EVGA card with melted cables.

It's not like eVGA 3090 and 3090 Ti didn't burn while gaming... oh wait!

 

[R-T-B]

EVGA boss must be happy he dodged that bullet. Just imagine the response if it was an EVGA card with melted cables.

The EVGA 3090ti shipped with an adapter cable like this.

Looking at mine, it appears they did not make the same wiring mistake. Shame we lost them as a AIB if only that they seemed to have this aspect sorted.

It's also only a 3x8pin (450W) cable though, to be fair.

 

[maxfly]

The other half wit decision Nvidia is rolling with is their policy of, "using an aftermarket adapter voids your warranty". I've not bothered to find out if that is in regards to FE specifically or covers AIBs as well. It's ignorant for them to believe they can enforce such a policy in the first place, "Oops I threw the adapter away", comes to mind immediately. Not to mention trying to keep consumers from using a superior solution is purely asinine.

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

The other half wit decision Nvidia is rolling with is their policy of, "using an aftermarket adapter voids your warranty". I've not bothered to find out if that is in regards to FE specifically or covers AIBs as well. It's ignorant for them to believe they can enforce such a policy in the first place, "Oops I threw the adapter away", comes to mind immediately. Not to mention trying to keep consumers from using a superior solution is purely asinine.

Funny, that clause is usually to stop sub par adapter's being used, the irony.

 

[The red spirit]

The other half wit decision Nvidia is rolling with is their policy of, "using an aftermarket adapter voids your warranty". I've not bothered to find out if that is in regards to FE specifically or covers AIBs as well. It's ignorant for them to believe they can enforce such a policy in the first place, "Oops I threw the adapter away", comes to mind immediately. Not to mention trying to keep consumers from using a superior solution is purely asinine.

It's classical nVidia. I still haven't forgotten PhysX, Gameworks, GPP and their other bullshit.

Funny, that clause is usually to stop sub par adapter's being used, the irony.

Update, another dead cable:
https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/yexxqp
Is it just me, or it looks like there are way more Asus cards burning adapters than other brands?

 

[Zyll Goliat]

RTX 4090 so good that will melts in yours RIG!!!​

 

[Batou1986]

Man looks like even Jensen himself has been swept up in baseless fearmongering.
People are totally just bashing Nvidia because they are biased fanboys not because this is a problem totally of Nvidia's making.

 

[P4-630]

Not sure if this link had been posted or not

The horror has a face - NVIDIA’s hot 12VHPWR adapter for the GeForce RTX 4090 with a built-in breaking point | igor´sLAB

Those who are now beating up on the new 12VHPWR (although I don’t really like the part either) may generate nice traffic with it, but they simply haven’t recognized the actual problem with the…

www.igorslab.de

 

[Solaris17]

Don't know if this has been posted yet

Adapter gate? NVIDIA briefs all board partners this morning and makes damage an absolute boss issue | igor´sLAB

That this with the faulty 12VHPWR adapter (“must break”), whose investigation I had published this morning as an article and video, will not proceed without noises and a larger wave…

www.igorslab.de

Literally previous page

Not sure if this link had been posted or not

The horror has a face - NVIDIA’s hot 12VHPWR adapter for the GeForce RTX 4090 with a built-in breaking point | igor´sLAB

Those who are now beating up on the new 12VHPWR (although I don’t really like the part either) may generate nice traffic with it, but they simply haven’t recognized the actual problem with the…

www.igorslab.de

lol a few posts up.

 

[Tomgang]

Yeah, I can just as well order another adapter from CableMod or something like that. Now we maybe know the culprit of this. Over time the connectors can be fire hazards. Maybe not now. But over time as it gets plugged in and out. For cleaning gpu, upgrading pc and so on. You are bound to put maybe unintended force in those wires and soldering. Over time they can break even if you're not doing it side by side but up and down.

I can just as well take the problem and solve it while it is still not dangerous. Over time with the standard connector I now feel it can be dangerous. So it's not only ugly, it is also dangerous to use.

At times I leave my pc turned on unattended and with that fire hazard inside the pc. I'm sure you can guess how I feel about that. I don't feel safe with this connector any more. It can cause a fire, damage my very expensive pc. In worse case, burn my home down. Not taking any changes.

 

[wheresmycar]

NVIDIA!

Things aren't looking good...

...the poor attempt 4080-12 withdrawal, 4080(segment)-16 absurd price increase, 3060 cheeky trim, DLS 3.0 being a farce and now a fire starting 4090 hazard for a mere $1600-$2000

NVIDIA!

 

[Gatt]

Does anyone remember that in September this was the warning by many card manufacturers (Zotac just to name one)? As far as I remember few reviewers wondered why ... thats why.

 

[Deleted member 185158]

So what they did, and I'm mentally facepalming pretty hard over here, is take 4 14-ga wires, solder bridge them onto 6 pads, which then lead not to individual contacts but a contact block. Meaning that when one wire loses contact, the GPU has no idea, because they're all merged at the contact block, and will merrily continue to pull all the current through the remaining wires/pads. Who signed off on this?

View attachment 267448

Would have been nothing wrong with 3x 8 pin and a 6 pin if needed(Imo)

Trying something new over something that already works.

My question is, Are they still going to try and push 12 pin connectors?? Are they going to sell that many high wattage cards in order to change the industry standard??