The saga continues over a year after the first problems with GeForce RTX 4090's melted 12VHPWR connectors were reported. A NorthridgeFix repairman claims he must fix about a hundred GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards with failed connectors every month. He insists the connector failures are not user error, but issues with the connector design.
"We get about 20 to 25 [GeForce RTX] 4090 [graphics cards] a week," the repairman said in a NorthbridgeFix YouTube video."
This volume highlights just how common the issue is with this model. To illustrate how many GeForce RTX 4090 graphics boards come to repairs, the repairman said he had to get a half-mask respirator and an air purifier to protect his health when he fixes the melted connectors.
"We get them in so much that I bought myself this Hiroshima mask, so I do not have to smell the burn on those conductors," he said. "It smells like fireworks times ten. It cannot be healthy to keep smelling burnt connectors."
Back in November 2022, Nvidia said that it was aware of 50 cases of melted GeForce RTX 4090 power connectors and that the standard issue was that they were not fully plugged into the graphics card, which essentially meant that it was a user error, not a failure of the connector.
Although Nvidia denies that the issues with melting power connectors on some of its GeForce RTX 40-series graphics cards lie in the peculiarities of the 12VHPWR auxiliary PCIe power connector itself, PCI SIG has now redesigned the power plug. The new 12V-2x6 addresses the main drawback of the 12VHPWR, its fixing force, and alters other aspects of the specification. This suggests that the 12VHPWR connector specification was so flawed that PCI SIG had to redesign it.
"So now it is safe to say the [GeForce RTX] 4090 melted connector is not a user problem," the repairman said. "We discussed this many times in the past, but I want to mention one last time that this is not a user error."
Edit, 11/12/2023: Corrected title.
