NVIDIA & AIBs Team Up To Investigate and Resolve GeForce RTX 4090’s 16-Pin Adapter & Connector Issues
A few days ago, we reported the first few cases of the new 16-pin connectors featured on NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards burning up and melting. The issue was earlier thought to be due to the bends within the 35mm clearance that PCI-SIG had clearly stated would cause huge thermal variance and lead to damage. But over the past few days, testing from various professionals in the tech industry has given us more clues as to what might have happened. Ronaldo Buassali of TecLab and GALAX’s OC team hosted two live streams where he demonstrated the 16-pin connector and torture tested it through various loads, even up to 1530W (sustained). He discovered that an improper connection of the 16-pin cable can lead to large thermal variances and that may indeed be what’s happening with the adapters.
As users bend the adapter, certain cables can become loose, leading to improper contact force. This can cause thermal variance to occur and we have already seen that a faulty connection can lead to over 100C temps which would be enough to melt and damage the plugs over a certain duration or prolonged usage.
Loose connection = 100C+Good connecttion = 60-70C That’s while the connector is pulling a sustained 1530W load. There’s more here and it is possible that bending is not the main issue here, force contact is. pic.twitter.com/HPIRLjjVlA — Hassan Mujtaba (@hms1193) October 26, 2022 It is good to know that NVIDIA is actively participating with its AIB to resolve this issue as early as possible. The owner of the first graphics card who reported this issue also stated the same thing that NVIDIA has asked Gigabyte for the damaged graphics card and the user will get a replacement from Gigabyte. NVIDIA knows this is a serious issue and they are trying their best to resolve this & provide us with further clarification as to what went wrong. via Igor’s Lab Igor has also run his own tests and found out that the main culprit is the NVIDIA-supplied 16-pin adapter which has an extremely poor build quality.
— Andreas Schilling 🇺🇦 (@aschilling) October 25, 2022 Each cable contact on the NVIDIA-supplied 16-pin adapter can easily become loose and it’s not just this adapter but certain ATX 3.0 PSUs may also have similar issues. Following is the summary provided by Igor: There’s definitely a problem but there are certain people who are trying to make it seem like a non-issue by running bend tests on their cards for a few hours when in fact PCI-SIG itself has stated that damage starts to occur around 10-30 hours of prolonged or sustained use. I can go ahead and say that all three of my RTX 4090 samples have been running fine since I started testing them but I can not 100% recreate the conditions that led to melting in the above cases. It requires long hours of tests and data to evaluate what’s really going on and actual specialists such as Igor and Ronaldo are doing great work in addressing these before NVIDIA discloses their official findings.
