Since the launch of the GeForce RTX 4090, more than a month ago, we have been seeing specific cases of users who said that their 16-pin connector had burned. The reactions were mixed, some were happy and shouted from the rooftops that NVIDIA had screwed up and that it was a serious design flaw, others preferred to keep a more prudent attitude and wait for more information about it.
The truth is that, From the beginning, all this smelled like burnt to me. If it really were a serious design-level bug, we would have seen many more cases, and on the other hand, we would also have much more information from the users themselves who reported those bugs. The latter is important, since I remember that, in fact, one of the first bugs that appeared barely contained an explanation of what happened and some photos that did not give not even a modicum of context.
At the time we told you that everything seemed to indicate that it was a problem generated by misuse of the connector, that is to say, that the user himself was to blame for not having used the 16-pin power connector correctly, although at first we focused on the problem of excessively bending the first section of said connector, since this caused the heat to accumulated in that area and the temperature reached alarming levels.
NVIDIA has confirmed that it is not a defect at the design level in the 16-pin connector, but that we are facing a problem derived from the misuse of it, although it does not have its origin in the bending of the cable, but in its incorrect insertion. This fits perfectly with the photographs we had seen, in which only a part of the 16-pin cable connectors appeared.
In summary, NVIDIA has said that they have identified a few 50 cases globally, and that the problem is caused by a bad connection of the 16-pin connector, that is, because users do not fully insert the connector, so that a part of it, or even the whole connector, it is not fully inserted and the contact between the pins is not made properly.
This fits with what Gamer Nexus recently discovered, and also with the marks of use of the cables that were processed under RMA. In all of them it can be seen that the wear line indicates that the connector not fully introduced. According to the data we have right now, NVIDIA has sold about 125,000 GeForce RTX 4090s, so the failure rate due to misuse of the 16-pin connector is only 0.04%.
This bug didn’t make any sense., since in the end the GeForce RT 4090 has a consumption similar to the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti and also uses a 16-pin connector, and the latter had no problems at any time. I also don’t understand why a user who buys a GeForce RTX 4090 doesn’t bother to make sure that he has connected the power cable correctly, but hey, in the end the mystery is solved.
