NVIDIA really hasn’t been able to catch a break with its 16-pin 12VHPWR woes since they began back with its Ada Lovelace architecture. Recently, a new case of an RTX 4090 adapter experiencing a near-death experience has come to light. The problem with this particular card, though, is that it suffered damage despite its owner having purposely limited its power draw.
Redditor InteKontoEtt shared their woe of a melting RTX 4090 12VHPWR adapter on the social network, indicating that they had started getting random black screen issues with their system after a few years. Again, they indicated within the comments that they had manually limited the power draw of the card to just 80% of its maximum limit.
To recap, the RTX 4090 has a peak TGP of 450W. Therefore, an 80% power limit is approximately 360W, which is more or less in the zone of an RTX 5080, and as pointed out by Videocardz, is typically less likely to be subjected to these issues. But life as we know it tends to have different plans, as evidenced by InteKontoEtt.
Other details could have led to the demise of their RTX 4090: the PSU was a Corsair RM1000x, which was made back in 2021, and as such, predates the arrival of the 12VHPWR power adapter. As such, InteKontoEtt would’ve had to use a four-way 8-pin to 16-pin adapter, in order to power their Gigabyte-branded Lovelace flagship GPU. The owner indicated that all 8-pin heads were plugged in properly. Sadly, the damage was visible in one of the connectors, with a white mark indicating where the damage was done.
From the sounds of it, their RTX 4090 seems to have survived the ordeal, having caught the problem early and the adapter being the only casualty. At this point, it would be more prudent for the owner of the RTX 4090 to invest in a modern PSU, particularly one with a native 12VHPWR power connector.
(Source: Reddit, Videocardz, Uniko’s Hardware)
