US-based repair shop, Northridge Fix, recently put up a video on YouTube, commenting on the number of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 with melted 12VHPWR power ports it had repaired in a month. Two years since the first reports of the melting adapter issue. and the company says it is still dealing with the issue every day.
Northridge Fix says it averages 200 RTX 4090 repairs in a month. That’s double the number of affected cards it was handling last fall and frankly, that’s a little worrying. NVIDIA eventually addressed the issue, upgrading the connectors with a new 12V-2×6 standard. Sadly, the problem persisted with some units, due to another set of issues with the adapters, which were provided by CableMod.
Northridge Fix, however, says that the adapter CableMod made are actually good but was built on a broken foundation. By that, it means that the 12VHPWR standard is the culprit here. In this case, the revised connectors have shorter pins, which NVIDIA says is to ensure that the adapter has to be fully inserted into the RTX 4090’s port to get full power flowing. To be fair, the shop doesn’t state if the recent batch of affected cards are older or newer models.
If you’re using an RTX 4090, NVIDIA recommends that you stick with the official 12VHPWR power cables or the ones that come bundled with PCIe 5.0-specific PSUs, and avoid using any adapters that aren’t designed by the same brands. To be abundantly clear, this issue doesn’t appear to affect other RTX 40 Series GPUs as much, but there have been a handful of posts on Reddit that would suggest otherwise.
(Source: Northridge Fix, Videocardz)
