RTX 4090 Cable Gate Saga Continues, Nvidia’s Adapter Possibly to Blame
Previously all we knew was that adapters were melting. It was theorized it was somehow related to bending the adapter, which is required due to the size of the GPUs. Their width places the connector close to most cases’ side panel, necessitating an almost 90-degree bend to move the cable out of the way. This isn’t rocket science; you don’t want to put a serious bend on any electrical connection. This might not be an issue if the connection was as solid as a rock. However, it turns out it’s not very solid at all. This is seemingly due to insufficient soldering around the wires, which is meant to keep them in place. Igor’s Lab took one of the adapters apart to investigate, and the results aren’t pretty.
According to his investigation, there are six contact patches and four wires on each side of the adapter. Two on the edges are soldered to one point each, and the four in the middle are connected to two wires each. You can see in the photo there’s a surprisingly small amount of solder used for these connections. Igor says the connections use a 0.2mm copper base with 2mm of solder per wire. That leaves 4mm of solder for the twin cable connections.
For 14 gauge wire, that’s not much. Now just imagine bending those wires at a right-angle while they are hot, and you can see the problem. This could cause the solo cables at the edge to get loose first. Unsurprisingly, that’s exactly what we’ve seen in several of the reports so far (see below). When that happens all the current will flow through the remaining wires, so they will heat up drastically.
To summarize the findings, the problem is not with the actual cables coming from the PSU. Nor is it with the connector on the PCB. It seems to lie exclusively with the adapter designed by Nvidia. This is included with every Ada GPU and was made by a third party for Nvidia. Igor assumes Nvidia wasn’t aware of how poorly they were made, or it didn’t examine them too closely. If it had, it would never have allowed its add-in board (AIB) partners to include them with its flagship GPUs.
For now, Nvidia is still investigating according. In an update, Igor’s Lab says Nvidia has reached out to its board partners and asked to have all damaged GPUs sent to HQ for analysis. The next logical step would be for Nvidia to announce a recall for the adapters. It should have new adapters made, and replace them for free. That could take some time, obviously, and will seriously piss off current RTX 4090 owners. However, those gamers will likely prefer a safer adapter in the long run. They could alternatively purchase an ATX 3.0/PCIe Gen 5 power supply, but those are still hard to find. Plus, they will be expensive. Some companies like Seasonic and CableMod are also offering 90-degree adapters as well, but they’re not for sale yet.
Until we hear from Nvidia officially, our advice is pretty simple: be careful with your adapter, and don’t bend it. If it’s currently bending due to your case’s side panel, take off the side panel.
Continue reading
Report: Nvidia’s Next-Gen GPU Could Pack 18,432 CUDA Cores, 64TFLOPS
Nvidia's upcoming Ampere, which may be named after computing pioneer Ada Lovelace, could pack as many as 18,432 CUDA cores, a substantial increase over current top-end cards like the RTX 3090.
Nvidia’s Purchase of ARM Is Being Investigated by UK Watchdog
The ARM - Nvidia deal is receiving close scrutiny from UK regulators who want to make sure the deal won't break the underlying business model that has made ARM a worldwide force to be reckoned with.
Nvidia’s RTX 3060 Picks up a 10 Percent FPS Boost
Nvidia is bringing Resizable BAR support to the rest of the RTX family after introducing it with the RTX 3060 last week. Expect performance gains of up to 10 percent.
Nvidia’s RTX 3000 Prices Have Gone From Bad to Brutal
Nvidia GPU prices got much worse in February. Here's hoping March brings improvement.