Users report Nvidia RTX 4090 GPUs with melted 16-pin power connectors
videocardz.com
videocardz.com
So happy it didn't burn up now!
edit: Looks like the nvidia designed version has the connector angled front at 45 degrees while the non-nvidia versions in the article don't.
[1] https://en.overclocking.com/12vhpwr-adaptator-is-a-consumabl...
Also, these new connectors have the exact same rating as the prior 8-pin connectors.
Of course it's an internal connector and not something you're supposed to plug/unplug all that often, but I still think it sounds like a really low number.
Edit: there you go, found it - normal bog standard 8-pin PCI-e connector, rated for 30 connections:
https://www.molex.com/webdocs/datasheets/pdf/en-us/045586000...
Edit 2: found the quote from another article too:
WCCFTECH:
"Update: We have confirmed with NVIDIA that the 30-cycle spec for the 16-pin connector is the same as it has been for the past 20+ years. The same 30-cycle spec exists for the standard PCIe/ATX 8-pin connector (aka mini-fit Molex). The same connector is used by AMD and all other GPU vendors too so all of those cards also share a 30-cycle life. So in short, nothing has changed for the RTX 40 GPU series."
In my early days I saw a Pentium process melt the socket off the board. I don't understand how it didn't trip the power before it got that far.
Long story short: IMO the new connector makes me extremely nervous, running anything that can cause fire within ~14% of rated is not a wise idea unless you're doing Aerospace and have no other options. Even then they generally have extremely high QA and assembly verification, something I'm not expecting from computer OEMs.
And by experience, 40 is absolutely plenty. Almost all plugs in a computer are likely to only experience 10 cycles at most (and half of them only two; during setup and during EOL).
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/boards...
But I guess the CPU is still the hub of PCI-E networks right now.
And the new connector also adds 'sideband pins' so the power supply can tell the card how much power is available. That should reduce problems with random shutdowns due to drawing too much power.
With that said, a connector that melts clearly isn't an improvement.
No, most modern PSUs come with solid 8 pin connectors (as well as 6+2 pin connectors that you mention). If you watch the YouTube PC building channels, you'll see no one uses the latter for cards with 8 pin connector.
For reference, an Anderson PP45 connector pair (from 1966!) is smaller than the original 8-pin connector and would handle 660 W at 12V reliably at up to 10000 cycles (and can even handle hot-unplug).
In those kinds of cases, cable management and space/size tolerances can be very difficult - swapping four connectors for one makes a big difference
Besides aesthetics and ease of integration in the chassis, air flow / cooling is a non-trivial issue, particularly with the wattages systems are running now. More or wider cables increase chassis air flow impedance which requires higher pressure fans to overcome which translates to a louder overall system.
https://en.overclocking.com/12vhpwr-adaptator-is-a-consumabl...
Why would you still put the power connector on the side where the card will definitely get very close to the side of the case?
A new connector was absolutely necessary, even for more reasonable GPU power levels. That the current connector is broken is a different problem, and could likely be fixed without manufacturing changes without a new overall connector design.
There's a problem with running 600 Watts through that connector, if this fire thing is regular issue it's going to burn someone's house down or kill someone
The issue bending the cable near the connector is that it causes the connector pins to deflect, making the flimsy contact worse.
More conductor is unnecessary, it just needs to make a more reliable contact.
A 12VHPWR connector is using 12 pins for GND/12V.
An 8pin PCIe connector has 6 pins for GND/12V, with 4 connectors that's 24 pins total.
Assuming that the pins are fairly similarly specced, the old connector should be safer, especially when exceeding the rated power. Regardless of how you frame it, it seems like aesthetics got prioritized over safety.
I think that's the problem right there: running the connection at its rated limit. It implies that a damaged or slightly out-of-spec connector could fail, as we see happened here.
Defensive engineering involves safety margins for safety-relevant specifications. Running a digital signal at the limits of its specification is one thing; data corruption is a detectable problem and not inherently unsafe. Running power connections at rated limits is something else entirely because the failure modes are physical damage, fire, and electrical arcing.
600W of power delivery is no joke, and I'd like to see that power carried over cabling and connectors with absolute maximum ratings much greater than that, say 1kW. Per the specs, it seems that each of the 12 current-carrying conductors in the connector runs about 9A. A dodgy connection that results in just 1-ohm of resistance would then represent 80W lost as heat at that point.
Frankly, I think that running 600W over a single 12V multi-core cable is insane. You're talking 50A of current, or about the same current rating as the largest typical home circuits for an electric kitchen appliance or car charger. In the home, that calls for thick structural cabling, but it appears (https://www.cable-sleeving.com/pcie5-12vhpwr-16pin-connector) that the in-case recommendations are to use 16AWG wire or even a touch thinner.
So by the spec it must have at 10% headroom - and to live up to that, manufacturers must add their own margin on top. Rating for 1kW would be a 66% margin and a humongous waste of copper, and it wouldn't solve this contact issue in the first place.
Regarding wire gauge - unrelated to the problem at hand - 16AWG is already overkill. For house installation in EU, we rate that gauge for 13A to 18.5A depending on thermal conditons, with 13A being "very poor" thermal conditions (no cooling and surrounded by other hot things). With 6 pairs in parallel, that gives a conservative minimum of 78A capacity - and with the excellent thermal conditions of a case with fans ("very good" is normally just a dangling cable, not one with fans cooling it), the realistic capacity should exceed 120A. As you say, we need only 50A, so that's a 140% margin! Even 20AWG would be plenty here.
Pulling 50A through a connector of that size or smaller is in itself not an issue. As mentioned elsewhere, powerpole is smaller than an 8-pin connector and handles 55A at 10000 cycles without a hitch (even hot plug at 30A for hundreds of cycles). That this connector only does 40 cycles before breaking is caused only by it being poorly made or a poor design (e.g. relying on interference fit of contacts rather than true spring loading), and has nothing at all to do with the size.
The current plug is an ugly and cheap connector, so I don’t see aesthetics as a valid argument.
This is directly equivalent to the two sense pins on the new connector - except that rather than signalling 0, 75 or 150W, it signals 150W, 300W, 450W and 600W. Cable present has been given its own pin, together with a new "power stable" pin - all in the small 4-pin sub-connector, rather than wasting power pins for sensing.
No capabilities have been lost. Bad contact issues aside, it's a big improvement in every aspect.
(sorry for the off topic question)
Get a 3080ti or 3060 with 12gb of ram. If you want to experiment with very high memory models then pay for colab pro.
Next question is what are you training?
The latest cards are almost certainly faster, but you're normally concerned by VRAM than absolute speed. The 3090 (or the older Titan series) is unique in consumer cards in that you get almost double the RAM of the next cards down. I've had no problem training models on an 1080ti 8GB card but I wouldn't want to go smaller than that. System RAM is cheap in comparison, you can easily spec a 128GB machine, M.2 SSDs are a must for fast data loading, etc. Most CPUs are quads now, but more cores and lots of RAM means you can run more parallel dataloaders.
Otherwise there are plenty of guides that do a cost analysis of which cards to buy. If money no object then the 3090/Titan series, but maybe you don't need that much RAM. I saw a sibling comment mentions issues with heat - the stock 3090 has terrible VRAM cooling. I water cooled mine and it works well, but it's not cheap at all.
Actually I am more into RL than DL. But DRL use DL.
I don't need a machine at the moment, I am in the learning state at the moment. But eventually I will need something and passively want to learn on building my own machine. So trying to avoid costly mistakes.
It will be NVIDIA cards for sure. It does not have to be the latest, but I would like to be able to upgrade the cards without need to change the rest of the machine, at least not more than 10% of initial cost. I am very ignorant on this that's why asked how to build a machine starting with cheaper graphics cards but then be able to upgrade to latest and the best if I need to. I guess motherboard is the most important component but which one? Also, size of the box. Any article that discuss these in depth? Not videos, I prefer reading.
Money is not an issue unless I don't make the mistake of buying wrong components that does not fit both physically and compatibility.
I would like to build a compact machine yet able to upgrade, for example 2 graphics card eventually.
The biggest issue you're going to run into is available RAM. Card speed is less important, you can always train a bit slower, but you can't get around memory limits. A recent *80 series would be fine to start, e.g. the 2080/3080 have 10-11GB. You have to go to the higher end cards like the 3090 to get 24GB. Generally working on a single card is easier than distributed, so one 3090 is better than 2x3080 IMO. Fortunately the mining crash has made stock a bit more available and prices have stabilised a bit.
If you want room to upgrade to 3 GPUs then it's going to be a reasonably sized case. These are 2-slot cards at minimum and you're going to need to either buy a big PSU up front (1kW at least), or upgrade later. Any high end motherboard with enough PCIe slots should be OK though.
I don't have a particular guide in mind, at this point I would say just post on Reddit /r/buildapc or /r/machinelearning and say you want to build a 3-GPU machine, or see what others have built on there. You can use something like PC Part Picker https://pcpartpicker.com/list/ to filter by compatible components.
As for the rest of the components, don't sweat it too much. As to which is actually more important, it depends a lot on exactly what you are doing. 32 GB of RAM, basically any 'mid range' CPU from the past few years and an SSD an you're good to go.
One thing worth considering however is getting a latest gen CPU/motherboard so that you can upgrade the CPU in the future. For example, while you will probably find great deals on AMD AM4 CPUs and Motherboards today, you won't be able to upgrade to the latest AMD CPU in a couple of years since AM4 is end of life. Getting an AM5 CPU/motherboard will cost more up front but you will have the option to upgrade the CPU down the line.
Also as a final point, ask yourself do you really need an ML machine? If you're just 'playing around' consider sites like Colab and others that offer free or cheap GPUs for training ML models. I know lots of people who have done real ML research and publish actual ML papers using only the free tier Colab, so you can get quite far on it.
For GPU it depends on your vram needs, the Stable Diffusion stuff seems fine with 8, but Textual Inversion (adding yourself to the Stable Diffusion model, etc.) and text/transformers work needs more. I wanted the latter so I bought a used 3090 which was relatively cheap (compared to before, anyway!)
True, I guess it really depends on your workload. If you're not CPU bound and don't really expect to be, then getting the best CPU/mobo combo you can afford today and not worrying about upgrading might be the best way to go.
There has been many well known cases of diluting alloy ratios to save cost until a problem is found.
Unfortunately, it can be quite expensive to check atomistic ratios of metal parts in mass production.
It looks like the 12VHPWR cables don't bend very much close to the connection itself.
Since those cards already have dedicated power connectors why not have 24 or even 48 volt lines?
There really should be no reason.
I had to throw away many perfectly good power supplies when upgrading the graphics cards because they had not enough pins. So i would count out economic reasons.
Many 3d Printers started to convert to 24v recently because you have thin cables and overburdened plugs for high powered heaters and stepper motors. That caused no issue either it is amazing what modern voltage regulators can do.
The reasons were for better and more efficient power supplies, not having multiple voltage outputs with multiple current ratings, etc.
I'd be happy with a separate tier of PSU that has the standard 12v rails, but also includes a rail with 36 or 48 volts for dedicated GPUs. The less amperage running down those slim wires, the better...
You mean "amp down with up the voltage"?
But this is my reaction too. Running 50 Amps even these short distances is just silly.
I would think about maybe saying that the card is 48V and here are the dongles that let you put four of the regular power supplies in series.