Nvidia’s hot adapter for the GeForce RTX 4090 with a built-in breaking point
igorslab.de
igorslab.de
Even before this issue, ATX 3.0 felt like a missed opportunity to start phasing in 48v DC power. Very disappointing.
Not entirely sure though as I've never built those.
However in the longer term it's probably time to start optimizing for power efficiency just like Intel did after the pentium 4. Cards can't keep increasing requirements in this day of energy crisis. And the climate problem insures it'll be like that for a long time.
people on another HN thread yesterday literally were bitching about the cost (not safety - cost) of a $1 adapter being "forced" on them by NVIDIA and now you want to tell them they're gonna have to buy a whole new PSU? that's gonna be quite the comment thread.
but yeah you're right in general, gotta move to 48V to move forward, pushing infinite amps at low voltages is completely bass-ackwards. The pcie-add-in-card form-factor needs a rethink in general, the GPU is now the largest and most power-hungry part of the system by far, and power isn't the only problem imposed by that ancient AT standard. imo we should move to some standardized "module sizes" for GPUs so that we solve GPU sag and cooling at the same time.
the "pcie card" of the future should be a 12x6x4" prismatic module that slides on rails into a socket that provides a PCIe edge connector as well as a XT90 jag (or similar) for power, at a defined physical location, with 48V. Airflow should happen in a defined direction and manner, whether that's axial flow or blower-style.
also please for the love of god, hot air rises, the AT standard means axial coolers are pushing against convection. But we couldn't even get BTX to take off, which is a trivial modification of ATX to reverse the orientation and fix this problem, the DIY market is deeply deeply rooted in the 1980s and will not abandon ATX without some nudging. Enterprise and OEM are fine, their volumes are big enough to do their own thing, but consumers are spinning their wheels fighting IBM's 1980 mistakes.
It's gonna take government intervention, the EU is gonna have to step in and do it like with USB-C cables. The mess of arbitrary card dimensions slowly growing larger over time is the exact same problem that we had pre-standardization with USB too.
Smaller stuff that still reflects the "add-in-card" intention of the original design is fine, you can still have a bunch of PCIe slots for network cards and USB controllers if you want. But the GPU is not really an "add-in-card" anymore and it's problematic in a design sense to keep acting like it is, let alone to have every single product on the market doing something completely different dimensionally.
That's the "pre-USB-micro" era problem that USB faced.
There's no need for water though, that's a whole can of worms.
In any case, I've always used the standard water cooling kits and they never failed me (as opposed to constantly breaking fans and huge temperatures). Maybe it's my environment.
I am aware that modern gaming consoles are basically this but they make lot's of tradeoffs that a Desktop PC doesn't necessarily have to. Single Die GPU-CPU Combination for example. On the PC world you can reasonably pay twice as much and get twice the silicon for twice the performance, a tradeoff Consoles can't make.
and as for the server this could make essentially large 1U GPU racks possible by just having one big board per U with all the gpus in it.
You could have some standardization, a simple power negotiation protocol "I can supply 500W at 24V or 48V" and a standard (big) connector.
A long time ago the display was powered from the main unit, but we moved passed that and now displays have their own power cable.
> You don't have permission to access this resource.
That was just switched A/C, so you didn't need to turn off two switches when you were done.
Way smaller than SFX PSUs and "gaming" laptop power bricks.
I haven't used it but from the outside it all appears very thoughtfully and competently engineered. His products have some of the highest TDP support (passive cases and his PSUs) on the passive HTPC market and the hifi aesthetic is great. I'd love to get an H5 or an H1 (although for a HTPC it'd be nice to have the H1.SODD - the H1.TODD doesn't look nearly as nice imo), don't really need it but the cat would love it.
Streacom does some interesting stuff too (like the DB4 cube case). Not quite as high TDPs and I don't like their body/fin aesthetic as much, but the DB4 is cool. And Akasa as well, love the galactico design.
Mini-box is the company that originated the picoPSU design and they do a fair bit of other miniature-computing stuff as well, including for the embedded automotive market. They have 18650 UPS modules for NUCs and other motherboards, shows up as a battery in the OS. The M350 case is also pretty nice for an on-the-desk type mini-pc, clearly to hit $50 you have to minimize costs but it's really the nicest $50 case that I've used in a long time (NZXT S340 non-elite got to $60 sometimes). The first picoPSU died within a day for no reason that I can tell but the second one has been fine, with the one caveat that the laptop brick is not low-noise at all. At one point I tried putting my PCs line-outs into an AV switcher and I was getting a groundloop and I could hear a bunch of noise. It was the M350/picopsu, when I unplugged it the other two PCs (including a dell laptop) were fine. Maybe not a typical use-case but it probably isn't the best choice for your SDR host or whatever lol. But HDPlex does have those linear regs...
It's super amusing that the 5700G (get the 5750G on ebay if you want ECC) is roughly as fast as my 9900K in most things but it does it at like 60W in a SFF case, can go even lower without much hit with eco mode. And it also can sorta game (in non-action stuff or older stuff). One night for fun I decided to play Team Fortress 2 at 3440x1440 on it, and it actually got a reasonably playable framerate... with a maxframes-config it would drop to around 30fps in teamfights but hey, returning to my roots playing it on my thinkpad w510/fx880m lol. I might have been able to push it farther with some res reduction but it was doing OK generally actually. It's also (again, roughly, haven't actually benchmarked) around the same speed as my 9900K in H264 encoding. The power scales very little past stock (at least during CPU workloads), just set it for silent and let it run, eco would probably be even better.
Tho if you threw 2 of these PSUs side by side in a laptop bag, they'd be noticably thinner than any MacBook charger (29mm vs 25mm) even though each one delivers >250% the power.
I saw the connector and did a double take, it has a third row of smaller signal pins which none of my existing power supplies have. Not even my newest which is a 750W from last year. Sone new gpu power connector. So I assume most people had to buy a new psu anyway.
I am all for higher voltage. 24V is the standard in industrial automation as well as off highway machinery and european trucks. 48V is common in telco but positive ground though it is common in industry; I use 48v supplies for small stepper and servo motor amplifiers for motion control.
Were there high-end enthusiast-class BTX boards, comparable to the best ATX boards of the time? I don't recall seeing them in any numbers. Hell, even BTX cases from recognizable manufacturers are quite rare. It's obvious they were making the pitch to the largest OEMs, the Dells and Acers who can source their own cases and boards.
And the sales pitch was most compelling for them. If you've got a roasting Pentium 4 and a modest graphics card, you can fit them in the BTX "cooling channel" and keep them at a frosty 95c with a dinky heatsink and one or two cheap fans. That's not really exciting to an audience already saying "I can spend $75 on a kilogram of heatsink to get my CPU down to 70c, or $200+ on a custom-loop watercooling setup and get to 45c".
Maybe they needed to find a niche market for hobbyists to work with-- for example, the early "silent computing" crowd might have been more interested in marginal increases in cooling. After all, people are willing to consider other form factors when there's some compelling draw (see Mini-ITX)
I also wonder if the original design thesis still holds up. Once the Core series came out, "how do we cool this angry CPU" became less of a fixation, so it was probably easier to switch back towards commodity ATX designs. On the other hand, we've shot back past the original thermal situation and then some-- would the design still hold up with an unlimited 7950X drawing ~250W and a 4090 drawing 400w all trying to exhaust it into the cooling channel, or would they bake each other to death?
I do agree that today's GPUs are ridiculously long, and nonstandard designs make them difficult to manage. Given that most outward-facing drives are gone, and SSDs have replaced most spinning rust in enthusiast PCs, I wish we'd see more "flat desktop" style cases. The GPU isn't sagging because its weight is directed mostly straight down into the case's bracing, convection is probably a little better, but it doesn't really help the power nightmare. They always make the cheap photoshopped jokes about GPUs with mains power, but maybe that's a stopgap solution-- sell the 5090 with an external power brick supplying, say, 48V/12A, and there's no internal cable gore and the power system can be 48v everywhere it matters. Then there's no need to design the rest of the PSU to guess what nVidia will want tomorrow.
Power Supply Manufacturers and Board Manufactures can't still agree on this little step. 24V/48V is a bridge too far!
Same issue has been plaguing the automobile industry, they can't wait to move from 12V to 48V for their low voltage works, but who will bell the cat?
And in an entirely different area, 3D printing completed their transition from 12V to 24V some years ago, and currently there's an active push towards 48V.
I'm personally just looking forward to not spend a fortune on cables due to low voltages. It's frustratingly expensive to carry 12V a decent distance with some higher current draws.
That would be a surprising move to be sure. I assume you mean low wattage?
My understanding is that actuators want to be operating at much higher voltages and that 100V-ish is the lowest they really want and that modern actuators would much prefer to be up at 200-400V.
At least we already have a standard for that: the very recent ATX12VO standard.
600W out of 12V require 50 amps. This means you need more connectors, thicker cables and you have more resistive losses (= heat).
If you can get 48 V rails in, then you get down to a much comfier 12.5A, you can get that through comfortably on a pair of small-section wires.
His reasoning is that the melting is happening down at the pin end of the connector, not at the back, and the pins that are melting the most are the edge ones, not the middle ones.
There's about 10 minutes of critique of the various ways other people have been evaluating it, which is interesting for sure, but the meat starts here: https://youtu.be/yvSetyi9vj8?t=744
EDIT: Watched the video further, and actually the cable has the female side and they're using 2-split connectors. Yeah, that's asking for trouble when you push 50 amps through those... Sheesh, such shoddy stuff for a 1600$ card, just incredible.
Reminds me of the molded MOLEX to SATA adapters for HDDs that suffer from similarly shoddy wiring design and are prone to melting/fires. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAyy_WOSdVc
Indeed, it can also happen that because some connection is failing, too much current flows through the remaining ones, but this is clearly not what is happening here (because it's not the inner connectors that are melting, and also because Igor tried and couldn't replicate this). This really looks like heat from high resistance, and the outer connectors are simply those experiencing the most mechanical stress, and it's really easy for these 2-slit-connectors to get bend out of shape.
I get he may not care, but plugging four individual power cables into a GPU is a pain for consumers, and having a single connector for everything is great from the normal consumer perspective.
The takeaway being, even with a small fault in the connector, there's more than enough margin to ensure safe delivery and therefor, no molten pins or terminals.
The current connector seems to lack this, and if one of the terminals does not make a solid connection, then the drop in effectiveness is enough to push it out of spec and cause a failure.
I do greatly enjoy Buildzoid, and I was eagerly awaiting his video (and one from Gamers Nexus; note they haven't commented yet) from someone who actually looked at this from an EE perspective. I recognize his video was titled "rambling", but he largely repeated himself for 30 minutes, and scattered the relevant datapoints in the video in a few short snippets. A little planning on his delivery would gave gone a long way.
as compared to .. plugging four individual power cables into a stupid dongle?
The adapter has connected all four wires to all six pins. Losing one of the four cables is actually irrelevant because that means less power is going into the pins. What matters is that if you are missing one pin, then all 300 watts (single row) will go through the remaining pins. Power density is now 60 W per pin. Lose another pin and you get 90W per pin over the four remaining pins. This wouldn't happen with a dedicated cable per pin.
The resistance between the male and female connectors can be much higher than what most of us have expected. While I was down the rabbit hole trying to power one of my SBC correctly, one of the findings was that the resistance introduced by the connector can go up to *0.5 ohm*(don't even mention those dodgy power supplies and cables). But even if the resistance is only 0.1 ohm, it's still a big problem as the current is for sure above 10A for a single pin, and then the heat dissipation will be over 10W, which will of course concentrated around the contacting point, which is close to the tip. This explains why the tip side was melting.
Are they waiting for some major house fire news to break out before doing something.
Just don't buy a 4090. The technology is incredible, the model is stupid. Buy a 3080 Ti, or wait for a 4080. Like, don't buy a $1 million Bugatti, you could get a $250k supercar and it would probably be better for any real-world use. (But do people buying $50k BMWs complain about these things?)
s/vehicles/GPUs/
I'm pretty surprised this issue has gotten as long in the tooth time wise as it has. I remember seeing a story about this ticking-timebomb power connector like 1.5 months ago and then heard nothing. I'm guessing there is scurrying behind the scenes between then and now, but you never know.
Just to remove ambiguity, are you saying that the ABC<=X is long in the tooth or that the Nvidia connector is?
"Good" stories like ABC<=X, McDonald's coffee too hot, etc are infamous for a reason lest someone forget and repeat.
No need to beat about the bush, the "certain celebrities" is folks like JayzTwoCents who are willing to destroy their relationship with NVIDIA over this by showing that a company intentionally sells products they know are fire hazards, lied about that to the public, doubled down on the lies when they got called out on it the more people staretd reporting on it, and kept doing so all the way up to when official paperwork showed they knew about the issue and went ahead with it all along. The initial reports were "this is dangerous", but escalated to "NVIDIA knew this would could catch fire and pushed for sales anyway, this cannot be okay".
If this was a cable that just bricked cards, or even entire computers, that's a dick move but it's just a computer. No one died, just some hardware got destroyed. However, that's not what it does: it can literally start fires and people can die, and there is publicly available documentation that shows that NVIDIA is strictly liable (in the legal sense) for gross negligence (again in the legal sense). NVIDIA should be all kinds of sued and federally fined here.
They have handed out over $35 million in fines this year, with the largest being $27.25 million in 2018.
And of course with that said, $27 million is nowhere near enough to hurt a company like NVIDIA, which pulls in SIX BILLION DOLLARS per quarter. Even if they slapped down a 30 million fine, that'd be less than half a day's revenue, and basically says "this is perfectly acceptable behaviour in our country, thank you for dining, here's the bill, no tip required, come again".
For megacorporations like NVIDIA, "a million" is not a big number, it's passive income that rolls in over a lunch break. Real fines for megacorps need to "b" rather than "m" to actually matter.
This isn't an "insane fine" or a "relatively small problem."
These things are dangerous and they had to know that they were dangerous when they shipped them. They deserve to get financially nuked for being so ridiculously irresponsible. Companies that put profits ahead of consumer safety shouldn't be allowed to have profits.
On the other hand, this seems to be "they knew about it and went ahead anyway" a la Boeing 737 MAX, which is many, many levels above and it should be the equivalent to a financial nuke, IMHO. Recoverable, but something that is talked about in the company for the next 15 years.
Dare I say, if there's provably a person who was presented with this as a problem and overrode the decision so as not to delay the problem, there should be criminal liability for them?
This is an overcorrection to OPs comment. If Nvidia knew about the very real risk of fire but continued to push unsafe products with misleading statements, that is a significant problem and hints at a fundamental rot within the company.
Setting the houses of their customers on fire is a small problem??
Melting connectors is not all that uncommon of an issue with shoddy electronics. Well designed hardware rarely has this problem, but if you buy enough no-name import junk, you'll probably run into this with other products. (I have) Most of the time it does not cause a fire.
This isn't okay, but it also isn't Surfside condo collapse levels of bad.
The current provided from a base-spec USB charger is enough to start a fire, given the right (er... wrong) conductor. Plenty of us remember lighting Estes rocket motors with flashlight batteries (zinc carbon, no less) as a kid.
This is despite the use of a good conductor.
And the issue is that when the power source is that much more powerful you're more likely to make whatever is nearby catch fire.
The consequences are not small, and the action was apparently fully informed. Those two things combined constitute a very Big Deal deserving no forgiveness at all.
But: it's happened more than once now, which is the exact bar required to clear to count as evidence of a pattern of real world damages in court.
What's sorta new here is that these are genuine connectors - not aftermarket dreck - and they're already having issues at, as I understand it, around 70-80 % of the specced load (specified for >600 W, while these GPUs are normally limited to 450 W or so).
The pictures of the internals of this adapter are absolutely horrifying. This is 737-MAX style gross negligence: Several consecutive worst practices/shortcuts that ensure catastrophic failure one way or another.
They're insane.
I've been building my own PCs for over 20 years. I've NEVER had a connector melt.
I've never HEARD of anyone having a connector melt outside of maybe a post to /r/WellThatSucks of a single melted connector.
that said it's the SATA side that's the problem, not molex.
molex does have a reputation for scorching and arcing at higher current levels though. So does the Tamiya connector that is super common in the RC car world, terrible connector.
I see no good will in blocking free Linux drivers, just the same crap that earned Torvald's salute.
That they now opened a kernel driver is small improvement if the firmware remains signed.
Lives are more expensive than 2000 euros or 600 watts of electricity, even at current prices.
Western Europe crying under the bed ...
It really isn't in Europe.
> a couple thousand isn't much for the developer & hobbyist market the card is aimed at
Why would a developer be the target of a gaming gpu?
This GPU is for hardware and gaming enthusiasts with sufficiently deep pockets.
Users report Nvidia RTX 4090 GPUs with melted 16-pin power connectors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33327515 - Oct 2022 (99 comments)
On another note, did EVGA see all this coming?
At a certain point it's just stupid. My work laptop (Macbook Pro M1 Max) can do some very impressive stuff in such a small quiet package, and it just makes sense to go with a single large APU in the future.
It just seems to me like Apple (with the trashcan) painted themselves into a corner with thermals. Then Intel did the same by missing node generations and are just pumping more current (or voltage, heck I don't get electricity). Now Nvidia is doing the same now with an aging reference platform that needs an overhaul.
I feel that it's simplistic to say that Apple has the right strategy with APU's, because gamers want faster and faster gaming performance whereas Apple are making custom silicon for very narrow use cases (namely video editing) and consumers perusing the internet and organising photos.
Funnily enough, I do think that Apple have the right formula longer term for general purpose computing with APU's.
It just that if Nvidia want to keep pumping out bigger and bigger GPU's while upping the voltage and heat then things need to change.
The x86 platform needs a page one rewrite.
EVGA opted out.
In this generation, they would actually need 4x8pin to reach the 600W maximum these cards are supposed to be able to draw in a fully overclocked state, so really this just comes down to PCB space, but with the draw getting this high, the cable also has some signalling wires so the card knows how many Watts it should limit itself to.
The bigger reason is probably to save board space as nvidia have been shrinking the form factor of the actual boards so they can dedicate more room to flow-through cooling. Connectors take up a lot of board edge.
The new spec does also have data pins so the devices can negotiate for power which could in theory reduce issues and inform the consumer better about limits with future PSUs and devices.
So there are advantages to the new spec, both specifically with the form factor and more generally.
This is not exactly a hard thing to competently and cost-efficently build in Taiwan.
30W should be enough.
It's barely an upgrade over your 1050 Ti.
I urge you to check out the Gamers Nexus benchmarking of it before you consider buyinug it. https://youtu.be/La-dcK4h4ZU
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/arc-di...
Intel GPUs are great if you want the best linux drivers and they do AV1 decode and encode.
If you're, for example, a gaming streamer, or you need to encode CCTV or other kinds of footage and stream it as cheaply as possible, or if you do video editing in DaVinci resolve or other apps, then the AV1 accelerator capabilities of such a budget GPU are a godsend.
You know what would teach Nvidia? Buying more 4090 cards at crazy prices. Vote with your wallets. Wait on actual lines to give them more money for stupid products. Moar powah, more upscaling crap, more latency. Moar
Gigabyte promised 4 years warranty - I hope they’ll keep their promise.
Throwing thermistors all over a GPU to prevent it from catching on fire, is like putting bandaids in a box of cheerios so when the razor blades cut you, you can stop the bleeding. Cheerios should instead never have razors in them.
> Correct, that's why you can have a system to check if any connector is getting hot.
> Throwing thermistors all over a GPU to prevent it from catching on fire, is like putting bandaids in a box of cheerios so when the razor blades cut you, you can stop the bleeding. Cheerios should instead never have razors in them.
No, it's more like having a smoke detector in a house. Sure, household equipment shouldn't suddenly catch fire, but sometimes they do.
EDIT: This is a crimped wire for ATX power connectors: https://modmymods.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/a8...
Notice that the insulation is also crimped, making sure that the actual electrical connection doesn't flex.
Welding can be better than solder or crimp, but it's uncommon except for applications like wire-bonding and battery cell termination.
In general, any application where you have a fixed end on one side and a free end on another (wire to board, wire to panel, wire to X), a crimp termination is by far the better choice.
A server under max load 7/24/365 is really testing its design limits.
1. Especially a pc with an RTX 40X0 card - because only enthusiasts are buying them at this point.
Solder has better electrical characteristics, but that benefit is outweighed in the field because the connections can break and fail.
Soldering can work well too, but there are so many things that can go wrong. Heat can deform the connector housing, lowering the contact pressure. Solder might run down the connector and coat the contact surface, making it unreliable over time. It might also wick down into the insulated portion of the wire, turning what should be a flexible part of the interconnect into a reliability problem, especially in the presence of motion or vibration. Last but not least, lead-free solder complicates visual inspection, making it harder to reject bad connections at the factory.
You can make bad connections with either soldering or crimping, but all in all, crimping usually wins when it comes to cable assembly. In a production setting, it is easier to establish and enforce a high-quality process when all you need is the right crimping tool and die and a few minutes' training.
I x-ray every soldering job out of the oven and off the irons where I work, and that's a TINY LED company. Visual inspections of solder joints can be very unreliable no matter which solder is used. A company making these sorts of cables should be using even a cheap $10K Scienscope at the minimum.
That's about vibration and bi-metallic corrosion, not current handling. Gas tight crimps solve both problems whereas solder fairs poorly. Low cost PCs can't be expected to tolerate either high vibration or the elements, so a soldered design with sufficient margin for imperfect conductors could work fine in a PC.
Way to give yourself a black eye NVidia. High power needs a margin for error and there is clearly none here.
The wire insulation is rated much lower than the connector (105C vs 170C). You will certainly melt the wires before the connector.
At a higher voltage, these wires would be fine for purpose.
>However, the “safe” is only valid if e.g. the used supply lines from the power supply with “native” 12VHPWR connector have a good quality and 16AWG lines or at least the used 12VHPWR to 4x 6+2 pin adapter also offers what it promises.
Like what is this? I know those words, but that sentence makes no sense.
What is this 12-pin Molex bullshit? Why the hell would you need 12 pins? Use some Anderson PowerPole connectors, XT30/60/90, or some other connector designed to handle high currents.
However, the “safe” designation for the connector is only valid if e.g. the used cables from the power supply, with a “native” 12VHPWR connector, are of good quality, and the 16AWG cables or at least the used 12VHPWR-to-4x6+2-pin-adapter also live up to what they promise.
“It’s legal to drive only if e.g. you have a driver’s license.”
It’s not a great way to say things but it is meaningful. The meaning is “only if [unspecified list of things], and [x] is an example of an item in that list”.
> However, the “safe” is only valid if e.g. the used supply lines from the power supply with “native” 12VHPWR connector have a good quality and 16AWG lines or at least the used 12VHPWR to 4x 6+2 pin adapter also offers what it promises.
Here’s my interpretation:
> However, the term “safe” is only valid if certain things are true, e.g., the used supply lines from the power supply with “native” 12VHPWR connector are of good quality…
I can’t interpret the rest of the sentence.
“It’s only safe given certain conditions, e.g x”
I'd recommend people gloating to read the article. EDIT: (see my edit below).
The conclussions are clear:
- The problem is NOT the new connection; that's fine. New PSUs come with a connection that does not need any adaptor and those are safe and work fine.
- The problem is a poor quality adaptor shipped with 4090s for people that buy a 1600$ GFX but then skimp on a new PSU and want to pair it with an old one (EDIT: skimp is out of place and victim blaming, I'd guess it would be more appropiate to have said here that NVIDIA and partners decided to add an adapter to avoid suggesting that users need a new PSU).
These adaptors are distributed by NVIDIA but build by a supplier. Igor's recommendation is, I quote: "NVIDIA has to take its own supplier to task here, and replacing the adapters in circulation would actually be the least they could do.".
EDIT: This comment can be misunderstood as me speculating whether the OP read the article or not. I am not speculating: the OP did not read the article, which claims the opposite of what the OP claims. The OP claims that 12V solutions are the issue, while the article states that they are fine, and as proof shows that new PSUs implement them correctly. In fact the _goal_ of the article is to set the record straight about this, by precising that the only problem is the quality of the adapter, not 12 V per se. So this comment is not an speculation about whether the OP read the article or not, but a response to set the record straight for those who might read OPs comment only, but not the article (I often come to HN for the comments more than the articles, so I'd find such a comment helpful myself).
The problem is with the adapter design, it is not just one bad choice but multiple layers of negligence that compound the issue.
* The adapter has 6 pins all bridged together by thin connections that can break.
* 4 heavy gauge wires are attached to those pins with a surface mount solder joint. They're not through hole soldered which would provide more contact AND far greater strength. They're not crimped which would provide the best contact and strength.
* There's no strain relief. So if you hold the cables close to where they're soldered to the connector and flex it you can easily break those surface mount solder joints.
* Because the 6 pins / 4 wires are all bridged asymmetrically, some bridges have more current passing through them and if they're fatigued or damaged they'll have higher resistance. Higher resistance means more heat.
Overall it's just really poorly engineered on multiple levels. It's diarrhea poured over-top an open face shit sandwich.
Those with older PSUs should have had to make a decision about whether they want an adapter or not, and then pick an adapter of the appropiate quality.
If it was late in the development cycle that this was discovered, then the proper thing to do would have been to delay the release, or just not include adapters and offer them later. It would have been a minor PR hit, but not nearly as bad as shipping adapters known to be faulty.
Those refer to a PCI Express Forum issue that was opened about the connector drawing too much power, not the adapter.
NVidia should just include an adaptor that's not a fire hazard. The consumers are not to blame here.
Ps I think you mean "skimp"
I think it would have been better for these cards to not have an adapter at all. I've added an EDIT to try to word this differently.
This is a neat way to parallelize and scale up this swipe but it's still the same swipe:
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
Cards like this beast may be the Plymouth Barracuda of this PC era.
I envision some combination of LFNs and diffusion; you could produce near approximations of likely desired scenes and have the client select and refine WRT its input and previous state.
USB PD 3.1 can handle 240 watts over an appropriately-rated Type C cable, so 3 such cables could handle the load with some margin to spare. PC power supplies could do worse than to move in that direction.
Maybe this is not just a bad design, but physics trying to warn us this path isn’t smart.
[citation needed]
Hooray for the clarity of sarcasm in text. Sigh.
I know it’s not that bad. A standard wall circuit can’t supply that much power. But I find the power levels graphics cards have gotten to crazy and think that’s what we should be solving, not how to supply them more power without things melting.
The 12VHPWR connector is actually rated for up to 600W.
If the cables are rated high enough and the PSU is large enough, there is no wattage that is "less valid" than any other. The 3090 TI from the previous generation runs at 450W too, it just uses 3x6+2 cables rather than nvidia's fancy adapter.
I'm looking forward to the day my PC uses more electricity than my air conditioning. With the power of GeForce I might see that day.
The connector is shoddy, and it's good entertainment value for me personally who can't afford the card.
But that beast of a card, despite all the amps and watts it swallows, is a very affordable tool for computational tinkerers--think people working in their garage in the next molecular simulation software or AI application--not to mention graphical artists and architects. True, you can get more computational power by paying for cloud services, but a cloud workstation with 32 Gigabytes of RAM without any GPU will cost you 1700 USD/mo in AWS, and you will have to connect through a RDP interface that just hurts.
So, back to the connector, I hope Nvidia and third party manufacturers solve it. I will wait to burn the bridges until the day when they decide they won't sell the cards anymore and instead rent them at the same price that Amazon does. We don't need another Adobe.
Anyway, for home tinkering the 4090 is generally a minor improvement over a 4080 or even vastly cheaper cards. More is better, but not always by very much.
That said, the real value of cloud services is you can sometimes get more done with 2TB of RAM for 4 hours than you can with 32GB of RAM for 4 months. All without the need to have that much computing power anywhere near you.
I know that. Alas, I can't get more programming done with 2TB of RAM in 4 hours than I can get with 32GB in three years. Human limitations.
If I spend both of $1600USD on a product, I assume the included adapter will work.