Vendor Had Twenty 16-Pin Adapter Meltdowns Among Tens of Thousands Sold

12VHPWR 90 Degree Angled Adapter
12VHPWR 90 Degree Angled Adapter (Image credit: Cablemod)

Amidst the increasing user reports of more 16-pin power connector meltdowns, Cablemod has provided some insight on the issue on Reddit. According to the custom cable and adapter manufacturer, there have been meltdowns with the brand's 12VHPWR angled adapters, but they're very rare. The 16-pin 12VHPWR connectors are found on many Nvidia GeForce RTX 40-series GPUs, which power many of the best graphics cards, so this is an ongoing concern.

Although Cablemod didn't provide specific sales numbers, the vendor stated that it has only received reports of 20 instances of the 16-pin adapter melting. Cablemod has reportedly sold tens and thousands of adapters, amounting to a failure rate of less than 1%. In other words, it's not a common occurrence, but the issue is still persistent. A couple of Cablemod customers reported meltdowns in the same Reddit thread, but the company's support team is already attending to the cases.

Again, the company didn't delve into numbers; however, it claims that most cases involved RTX 40-series owners not fully inserting the adapter into the connector. Defective adapters only barely contributed to the failure rates. Some of you may be asking yourselves how hard it can be to plug in a connector since DIYers have been doing it for ages. Many have questioned the 16-pin power connector's design, whether its minuscule dimensions, making it difficult to plug in, or the latching mechanism that sometimes doesn't do an excellent job of holding the connector in place.

Cablemod's analysis of the melted adapters primarily points to user error, falling in line with Nvidia's investigation, dating back to November 2022. The chipmaker was seemingly looking into ways to make the 16-pin power connector more secure, but given that we haven't heard anything from the company, its efforts have gone stale.

Graphics card manufacturers have thought of other ways to facilitate the correct installation of the 16-pin power connector. For example, MSI made the 16-pin power connector yellow, allowing consumers to see whether the connector is plugged in entirely. If you notice any traces of yellow, the connector isn't fully inserted.

Meanwhile, Asus has a concept design to rid consumers of the 16-pin power connector, replacing it with a proprietary connector that slots directly into the (Asus) motherboard. Inno3D and Gigabyte opted for a more straightforward solution and just relocated the 16-pin power connector to offer more spacing for cable manipulation.

Nvidia and its partners have provided affected consumers RMAs for the damaged graphics cards. Cablemod is also standing by its customers who have purchased its 16-pin adapters. The company covers shipping costs for damaged graphics cards to the repair centers. In scenarios where the vendor denies the RMA, Cablemod has offered to reimburse the affected party the full purchase price of the graphics card.

Cablemod currently sells its 90-degree and 180-degree angled adapters for $39.90. The company also offers 90-degree angled cables for various power supply brands, including Corsair, EVGA, Seasonic, be quiet!, etc., for $29.90 on Amazon.

Zhiye Liu
News Editor and Memory Reviewer

Zhiye Liu is a news editor and memory reviewer at Tom’s Hardware. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.

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  • tennis2
    Is this insinuating that the internet is overreactive!?
    Reply
  • King_V
    Maybe. Maybe not. Whatever the percentage of melted cables (and damaged video cards) with the 16-pin connector . . how does that number compare to the number of melted cables/damaged video cards with the traditional 6 and 8 pin connectors.

    Of course, where the connector is the issue, and not, say, using a dumpster-fire PSU with molex-to-PCIe connectors, or other such nonsense.

    Is the 16-pin failure rate drastically different than the 6-pin/8-pin failure rate, or not?

    I don't know the answer to that. I suspect that it's notably higher, but my gut feeling doesn't really account for anything.
    Reply
  • hotaru251
    product development 101: Make it fool proof.

    yes, it might be due to not plugged in all the way..but thats user error and you must design with that in mind.
    Reply
  • mr_stench
    Even single one melted connector on a 1 000+ $ product is unacceptable. The thing is operating on the edge above 400W whatever the spec says...

    There will always be tolerances in the manufacturing quality of connectors. A design where there is no margins for quality imperfections is a bad design. They can just put two connectors on these high end GPU's and everything will be fine.

    I have never heard or read about a melted 6-pin/8-pin connector in my life.
    Reply
  • InvalidError
    mr_stench said:
    There will always be tolerances in the manufacturing quality of connectors. A design where there is no margins for quality imperfections is a bad design.
    The connectors themselves have a 100+% safety margin and will pass 100+A continuous fine when properly inserted. I'm not aware of anybody who has managed to melt a properly inserted connector. There are people who claim they had fully inserted their connector but most of their pictures tell a different story with witness marks saying they were 1.5-2.5mm short from fully inserted at some point.
    Reply
  • Kamen Rider Blade
    InvalidError said:
    The connectors themselves have a 100+% safety margin and will pass 100+A continuous fine when properly inserted. I'm not aware of anybody who has managed to melt a properly inserted connector. There are people who claim they had fully inserted their connector but most of their pictures tell a different story with witness marks saying they were 1.5-2.5mm short from fully inserted at some point.


    Now we need them to fix the latch to make a very satisfying "CLICK!" sound when it properly latches, like the old 4/8-pin EPS Cables or 6/8-pin PCI Cables
    Reply
  • atomicWAR
    tennis2 said:
    Is this insinuating that the internet is overreactive!?
    Is water wet? The internet tends to overreact but it does get results on occasion! Unlaunched 4080 12GB. Then the prices on lower tier 60 series Nvidia GPUs while still a bit insane for the lack of VRAM are still less insane then we expected going off previously released cards in the 70/80 series cards. The 4090 is another beast though which was only marked up 100 USD (6% increase) while giving you a 60% performance boost leaving you with 10 times the performance increase compared to the cost increase vs last gen
    RTX 3090 msrp and performance. The RTX 4090 is still THE oddball this gen...
    Reply
  • InvalidError
    Kamen Rider Blade said:
    Now we need them to fix the latch to make a very satisfying "CLICK!" sound when it properly latches, like the old 4/8-pin EPS Cables or 6/8-pin PCI Cables
    For a connector to "click", the barb has to have enough slack to free-fall into place at the end of travel, which means it has that much space to back off too. Extra slack just for a "satisfying click" to make you feel better doesn't make the connector intrinsically more secure. Also, if you insert the connector slowly due to awkward orientation or concern for the amount of insertion force, the barb may just follow the lip shape and silently fall into place.

    I don't push my connectors in fast enough for them to make any particular noise.
    Reply
  • InvalidError said:
    The connectors themselves have a 100+% safety margin and will pass 100+A continuous fine when properly inserted. I'm not aware of anybody who has managed to melt a properly inserted connector. There are people who claim they had fully inserted their connector but most of their pictures tell a different story with witness marks saying they were 1.5-2.5mm short from fully inserted at some point.

    Yep... and no matter how well a product is designed user error will always find a way to mess it up.

    atomicWAR said:
    The 4090 is another beast though which was only marked up 100 USD (6% increase) while giving you a 60% performance boost leaving you with 10 times the performance increase compared to the cost increase vs last gen
    RTX 3090 msrp and performance. The RTX 4090 is still THE oddball this gen...

    Well said. Exactly why I bought it. Some call it overpriced... I call it a pretty good value compared to last gen and IMHO the only 4000 series card worth a purchase... as Nvidia planned I'm sure. :ROFLMAO:
    Reply
  • konkave
    I've been soldering the cables to the GPU board.
    Reply