Nvidia has recently found itself in hot water following controversies surrounding its GeForce RTX 4090 power adapter, the design of which appears to be prone to getting rather warm… to the point of melting both itself and the GPU’s power input. While this issue appeared to be limited to team green’s bundled cables, the problem may unfortunately be more widespread.
Since October 24, the Nvidia subreddit has been updating its ’16 Pins Adapter’ megathread with new reports of damaged RTX 4090 graphics cards and power cables. As the number of cases continues to rise, Nvidia has since taken it upon itself to personally test any partially melted GPUs and adapters, but now the scope of its investigation may need to include native 16 pin connectors too.
At the time of writing, there are now two reported cases of GeForce RTX 4090 pixel pushers suffering similar damage while using the new 12VHPWR connector. This suggests that the majority of the blame may lie with Nvidia’s best graphics card, or that there may be a fault with the best power supply models on the market too.
Either way, this isn’t a good look for the RTX 4000 series, especially with the new AMD Radeon RX 7000 GPUs avoiding the connector entirely. Here’s hoping that the RTX 4080 doesn’t befall the same muddied fate.