If you recently bought an RTX 4090 graphics card, you may need to be careful about how you install the product in your PC.
On Reddit, two customers who purchased the RTX 4090 say the cable that sends power to the graphics card recently melted while they were gaming.
The customers both posted pictures of the problem, which deals with the 12VHPWR cable necessary to send enough juice into Nvidia’s most powerful gaming GPU. As you can see, the plastic around the Nvidia-branded 12VHPWR connector melted, and also caused slight damage to the power sockets in the RTX 4090 GPU.
"It occured mid game. GPU is still working," wrote Reddit user reggie_gakil, who requested a return of the product.
Nvidia has already reached out to one of the customers. “We are investigating the reports,” a company spokesperson also told The Verge.
It’s possible the problem could be confined to a few faulty 12VHPWR connectors that ended up shipping to unlucky customers. But the issue also occurs weeks after the industry group that oversees the PCI interface, called PCI-SIG, warned about potential thermal issues when using the 12VHPWR adapter cable with existing ATX 2.0 power supplies.
“Please be advised that PCI-SIG has become aware that some implementations of the 12VHPWR connectors and assemblies have demonstrated thermal variance, which could result in safety issues under certain conditions,” the industry group told members, according to a Wccftech report from September.
Slides from a PCI-SIG presentation show the thermal problems happen due to bending in the 12VHPWR cable, which can lead to overheating.
In addition, the company CableMod last month also warned consumers to avoid bending the 12VHPWR connector—even slightly—when it’s installed on an RTX 4090 GPU.
“Through our extensive testing, it appears that bending the wires too close to the connector could result in some of the terminals coming loose or misaligning within the connector itself. This may lead to an uneven load across the other wires, increasing the risk of overheating damage,” CableMod said. “The risk of this is substantially higher if the bend is done horizontally in relation to the connector orientation.”
According to images and their posts, the two users who experienced the melted 12VHPWR connector also bent the cables slightly near the pins when connecting them to the RTX 4090.
We reached out to Nvidia for comment, and we’ll update the story if we hear back. In the meantime, CableMod says users can prevent the thermal issues by making sure they only bend the12VHPWR cable at a “minimum distance of 35mm” (1.37 inches) from the 16-pin connector.
CableMod also created a 12VHPWR cable that can connect at 90 degrees, requiring zero bending. The product releases on Oct. 31.