NVIDIA’s 12VHPWR meltdown issue seems to have spread back in time, beyond the RTX 4090s and RTX 5090s. Supposedly, someone in China had the darndest luck when their GeForce RTX 3060 Ti decided to cause a scene by burning out its 12VHPWR connector.
Now, you’re probably wondering why a four year old card has somehow managed to be fitted with a power connector that only made its debut with the RTX 40 Series, so allow us to provide you with some background. The card in question, an Asus Megalodon RTX 3060 Ti, is a special variant, designed and built specifically for the Chinese market. The card itself is fitted with GDDR6X memory, rather than GDDR6, and more importantly, Asus slapped a 12VHPWR power port onto it, instead of the standard 8-pin PCIe power ports, or the old 12-pin connector for the Founders Edition.
The issue of the melting 12VHPWR cable, though, and according to the user’s account on Baidu, is that of a shipping error. Supposedly, Asus itself had gotten itself confused with the nature of the special RTX 3060 Ti that, instead of shipping it out with the 12VHPWR cable it needed, it packaged it with the older 12-pin cable that was used with the RTX 30 series.
While somewhat similar, the newer 12VHPWR cable feature an additional four sense pins that ensure proper detection and connection with the card. At this point, it’s safe to say that this was an honest mistake but given the market it serves, it’s a still a bit surprising that ASUS would even make such a mistake.
Another thing that is surprising about this scenario is just how much power the special RTX 3060 Ti was drawing in order to for the meltdown to occur. By default, the GPU’s power limit at 100% is 225W although it could theoretically hit slightly more than 310W. 12VHPWR are designed to withstand power delivery of up to 600W. So, even with the card pulling the latter amount of power, meltdowns at that level would be rare.
(Source: Baidu, Uniko’s Hardware, Videocardz)
