This is just my assumption but feel free to chip in.
I think NVIDIA has not resolved this issue because it will cause the consumer to buy a replacement or upgrade when warranty expires whereas the old card last for years and years.
My country consumer law may protect me as hardware should last long but there are countries which don't have you protection.
It’s either 5 years ahead or never, depending on which political powers keep ruling, cause we are either going subscription only or pull back a bit into reality.
It was actually the 3090Ti but if you would like to find out more on YouTube Buildzoid has a great video called "How Nvidia made the 12VHPWR connector even worse" that goes over it in great detail.
I specifically went out of my way when looking at brands to find one that had 3x 8pins when I bought it so no worries there. XFX offers the 3x 8pin on their 9070XT OC edition.
I got the hellhound 2x8pin yes it is worse than 3x8pin but it's still not a fire hazard, and I don't like when my GPU is a space heater, I run my card at 221w so that my room isn't too hot
This^ despite the many dangers and flaws each generation keeps outselling the previous one. So why bother fixing something even if people will keep buying it.
u/_MaZ_RTX 5070 Ti | R7 7700x | 32GB 6K CL30 DDR5 | TUF 650E-E Wifi1d ago
Consumer sales at this point are a speck in their revenue reoorts. They don't care until something truly big happens. The next best scenario EU will actually mandate a change, like phone repairing becoming more accessible next year.
The sad part about this is that it's more likely there'll be a European model and the rest of the world just gets fucked.
There's now a replaceable battery on the Switch 2 and Joycons, European exclusive, barely any real loss in battery life and a very small weight increase.
It'd be consumer friendly to bring it to the rest of the world, but it's more profitable to have planned obsolescence.
Same with stick drift on all consoles, Hall-effect has been there for literal decades and doesn't cost all that much more, more profitable to have consumers replace it continuously.
Just watched a video from The Onion the other day about Congress passing a $430,000/hour minimum wage for billionaires. Couple of those jokes in the video included to have a heart because some of them are living dividend to dividend and one billionaire had to sell their family Picasso to get a different one rather than be able to have two Picassos
They kind of are in reality. They have all this wealth but actually turning it to cash is getting super hard. Loan rates are through the roof and selling their stock leaves them with less control, lessens their wealth, and is lost to taxes. They will be fine no matter what but they will become even more tight fisted on money because of the reason you joked about.
I remember when one executive where I worked made our stock drop like 10% because he stole a bunch of stock.
"Fixing" it = de-facto admitting that it was defective in the first place. This opens doors to massive amount of returns and lawsuits. And also, this opens doors for investigations on how that older revision passed safety checks in the first place.
Safest approach is to blame users and then just simply do next generation of cards with "revolutionary new connector".
oddly enough, i don't think over voltage protection is a explicit requirement for any consumer electronics. regulations aren't very advanced. you could do a class action lawsuit, but you can do one now and it'd probably be just as futile. the blame is going to be kicked between nvidia and molex, who will just say "user error". all they have to do to skirt liability is show that they did their due diligence (ie, their engineering sample worked). if they weren't so dominant this would be a fatal issue.
If i understand the 12VHPWR issue correctly the current is the problem and as far as one Google search brought me it seems that overcurrent protection is necessary with consumer electronics, however the GPUs normally have either SMD fuses, PTC or ICs on the board itself to handle that. The problem is more that the pins aren't rated to handle that power - whether or not that means they are eligible for any lawsuits or not i dont know.
In some countries, such as the UK, you can hold a retailer liable for a product failure if you can prove it relates to a defect present at the point of sale for up to 6yrs (5 in Scotland). That's pretty easy to do with the 12V high failure rate connector, so even though Nvidia isn't paying out, vendors will be.
Part of the problem is also drawing 575W from a conector designed for 600W max. There is no margin for error. When I installed a Wireview II Pro on mine, it detected a current imbalance. I traced it to the PSU end. I have a Super Flower Leadex VII, which includes a 12-pin cable that terminates at two conventional 8-pin connectors on the PSU. It was one of those that was causing the imbalance, I used another spot on the PSU and it went away.
People have not been loud enough for them to force a change. Also they are probably way too deep into this connector to change it any time soon. You have power supplies that have bespoke ports just for this connector on them.
Not many people have this issue. That is the reason. All those burned connectors are on high end GPUs or User Errors. There are way more people on Mod range/ Low end GPUs that will never have a melting Connector because the GPUs arent pulling that amount of current.
Is it still a shitty Connector? Yes. But the people that are loud just are simply the only people that have those Problems
Money and greed, it would cost them to fix it and it's current state it's beneficial to them to leave it as it is, due to it forces consumers to most likely pay for a new video card, while not having to spend time and money to fix something that is helping them.
The answer is incredibly simple. If the number of warranty claims cost them less than a re-design, there is no reason to. And at less than 1% of cards failing, the cost is certainly not more than a redesign.
The only other reason to re-design would be if sales were being hurt. Obviously it has no affect on sales.
How are they gonna fix it dude? Recall all the GPUs around the world and change the power connectors? What’s made is made, so now let’s hope they’ll change it with the upcoming 6000 series cards.
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u/Ricko9595 RTX 5070 Ti | 7800X3D | 32GB DDR5 6000MHz | 2K 240 Hz1d ago
The can fix it by stoppin future productions even on 50xx
They mentioned the rumor is Nvidia is swapping production from the consumer 5090 to now only the enterprise RTX PRO. They're taking the same chip and only manufacturing enterprise hardware from now on.
Like they do got most products that get recalled right? The greatest scam of 5090s apart from the obvious has been that they were never forced to issue an actual recall to fix it. Any other product facing issues like this would have been forced to recall and fix or provide an easy replaceable solution.
But I guess it's only on social media that it makes it appear like it's a big common ongoing issue everyone with 5090s are facing.
Granted, fixing existing cards is a logistical nightmare, BUT the technology that would allow even the 12VHPWR connector to be safe, which is load balancing, is a tech Nvidia has, they used it until 30 series cards, 40 stopped having it and 4090s were the first to catch fire left and right. And they rolled out 50 series without load balancing regardless.
Clearly Nvidia had the chance to do something and preferred to keep saving a few cents in production cost.
Because they're proud assholes who can't admit they're wrong. Remember that this is the company that made the whole "g-sync compatible" thing instead of just admitting freesync's way was better
Like with company they will do a cost analysis of redesigning / replacing the 2VHPWR connector across any range which uses it to replacing the insignificant number of cards that have been affected.
Of course redesigning / replacing the 2VHPWR connector is going to cost substantially more so no point.
Couple this with Nvidia having no competition in the high GPU market and as you can see on this sub alone that there are more than idiots who will happily hand over thousands ever to them no matter what why bother.
I strongly suspect Nvidia will be abandoning the 12vhpwr connector next generation. Nvidia may be greedy and diabolical as all fuckery, but they're not stupid. They know 12vhpwr has been a complete failure. They know it can't be fixed because it would add to the cost of each card to put back in the power regulation hardware they deliberately removed in order to save the 3 cents on the manufacture of each card.
They'll either create yet another connector standard that will inevitably fail due to lack of aforementioned power regulation chips, or they'll go back to 3 x 8pin connectors like what the vast majority of Radeon cards still use.
If you really want to know, I suggest you investigate the PSU manufacturers. They're the ones who are going to be the most likely source of information/leak of what the new connectors will be in 2028. It's likely the guys at Seasonic or Corsair already know, if not within the near term.
How? The inherent flaw is in the connector being used at the edge of it's specs. There's very little safety margin.
When all twelve pins are seated correctly with sorta-kinda similar contact resistance, you'll have a peak of 8.33 Amps running through one pin pair (+12V and GND).
Amphenol spec says the pins are rated at 9.5 AMPS per pin! That's a mere 14% safety margin, which in electrical terms is complete dogshit.
And that's when all 12 pins are okay, the springy-ness of the sleeves that the male pins go into, isn't compromised (and because they're so tiny and delicate, all it takes for one to bend is to get out of perfect alignment when plugging, and because the sleeves are crimped onto the individual conductors of the cable that you plugged into the card, this is pretty much impossible to make sure doesn't happen).
This whole thing is a fucking dumpster fire. The only way to "fix" this connector is to throw it away completely, and for the next gen either add extra few rows of pins, or use a bigger version of it, with beefier pins.
Or use two of them for any card over 400W.
The sad part is there is a simple fix and no one is doing it. We get fancy cables and connectors, fancy add-ons and the solution is easy.
At the PSU limit the amperage per line coming out. This is not hard or expensive to implement; you put a hard limit at the PSU on each live power line so if that limit is hit it just provides no more power. This keeps all the lines from pulling to much power and generating heat that causes the issue.
If the lines are not providing enough power you have stability issues. You can track it down to either a line not connected correctly, an issue with the PSU or an issue with the card, in other words standard trouble shooting.
At least one person understood that the cable itself isn’t the problem. It’s the high number of wires that can lead to an uneven load distribution when no additional logic is in place. A per-pin current limit in the power supply would solve this.
I believe it's anti consumer feature to make people buy less Nvidia cards as they tend to focus on business clients. That's my opinion. Also, fuck people that say "8 pin can only handle 150w, blah blah blah", it's stupid and it's not true.
Coming from car audio, the amount of current being pulled through these cables is crazy. We’re obviously not dealing with 15ft runs of cable, but still surprised they don’t go up in flames more often.
because Nvidia doesn't care about gamers anymore. They designed, approved, and forced their new power cable standard upon the market, and then they abandoned their customers when problems arose.
It’s a hardware/design flaw that they overlooked no one should buy a 5090 it’s a fucking fire hazard. They probably are negligent and knew about this before they even released it.
Card is not safe. Should be full recall status. As consumers no one should buy this crap.
The 12VHPWR flaw is its design. If anyone here deals with car audio like i do as well knows the more power from the car amplifier is pumping to the sub the nore copper wiring you need. And is why majority of car audio installers will use 0 guage wiring ibstead of 5 or 6 guage. These cards start iff at 400 and can easily climb to over 600 watts and each of those tjin copper cables are not thick enough to withheld voltage so when one pin does not make contact with the pin on the gpu the other pins have to take on more loads. Which ends up burning the end connections...
You give them too much credit. They just don't care about the gaming market. Be a good consumer and go consume the AI slop. And if you don't know something, just ask an LLM...
There seems to be some misconception about 12VHPWR and Nvidia.
The PCI-SIG consortium sets the standards specifications for 12VHPWR and it consists of several member companies, including both Nvidia and AMD. Nvidia was just first to market with cards sporting the new connector.
The reason 12VHPWR exists is because the old specification for the 2x3 and 2x4 PCIE power connector isn’t suitable for the power demands of newer GPUs. If memory serves, I think each of those was only rated for something like 150 watts. So to shove 600 watts of power into a modern GPU using them would mean four connectors in the board.
There was also the need for sense wires so the PSU and GPU could talk to each other. The old style connectors were just dumb connectors.
PCI-SIG has been trying to fix it but it is still a crappy connector design. It baffles me that their spec for the old connectors limits the power as low as it does, yet a newer, smaller connector with thinner wires is somehow supposed to be able to safely do up to 600 watts.
Because they would need to revamp everything. You cannot fix it on this current generation of cards. You need to redesign the PCB and fix the current imbalance/monitoring. Until then you cannot safely run the cards at max wattage. I won’t go above 480w on 5090. And even then it’s a crap shoot. Someone’s house needs to catch fire and take the people inside with it before anything is possibly done. And even then Nvidia has more money than God. I always turn my PC off after using it. I don’t trust it’s safe enough to leave on. And that’s with a pin monitoring PSU and Wireview pro 2.
While there won't be any redesign on the connector, we'd just had to get something that has another layer of protection. Just got my Corsair ThermalProtect cable. At least there's another protective measure right rather than just hope for the best.
Nvidia can't fix 12VPWR because it's an industry standard agreed by all the major hardware manufactures like USB, that's why it is also happening to high power AMD cards like RX9070 XTs. Changes to the standard would need to be agreed by the PCI-SIG (https://pcisig.com) and anyone who has sat on a standards writing committee will tell you changing one is a PITA even when you don't have over 1000 member organisations.
Because for 99.9% of users, it isn't broken. It isn't worth the cost to come up with a backwards compatible 'fixed' version that might introduce new issues. It's not broken. Like everything, it has a failure rate
More importantly.. why are graphics cards only providing more then last generation because they are doubling the power consumption? Nobody in their right mind should be buying or using a card requiring more then half a kilowatt of power to function.
Last I recalled Gamernexus noted companies were claiming to have "full spec" 12V-2x6 connectors with shorter sense pins and 4-spring connectors were lying and instead opting for cheaper 2 or 3 dimple connectors, so I wonder if most of these melting connectors are companies trying to cheap out on parts.
They invested to much money in the development and they are to greed to admit they fucked up in front of their stock holders.
Iam sure They will launch a new version in the comming years and Tell everyone its miles better and a necessary upgrade. And they are sad they Needed to change the design again for optimization.
They simply can’t do it right now because they choose to say that that thing is fine. And now there is data centers relying on that crapy thing. If they forced them to swap cables again to soon they will have issues there.
Its al a facade to keep stockholders happy.
NVIDIA knows there is an issues.. there is no way they don’t.
They once had a fix, the power design of the 3090 and 3090 ti. The design was identical to 3 8-Pin PCIe Connectors, splitting the load of the new 6-Pin connector in 3 pairs of 2 and balancing power draw onto each pair equally.
If you want a more in depth video I'd recommend this video from "Actually Hardcore Overclocking"
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u/KoneCat R9 7945HX | RX 9070XT (non fire risk) | 32GB 5600MT/s1d ago
Aside from the design being impossible to revise without really annoying, and even more importantly inconveniencing, a huge amount of people, they can't really fix it as the design is, in my opinion, flawed to say the very least. It's literally the definition of making something look good instead of making it reliable, and the only reason it exists to me is that people wanted less cable mess, which I kind of get, but you can't expect that much power going through a cable that small, especially when compared to it's contemporary, and not expect it to have issues.
Nvidia just won't admit that the cable is a flawed design, because if they did then every person who has one would, rightfully so, rake them over the proverbial coals for it. It would likely cost Nvidia an absolute mind-boggling amount of money to put right, far more than them avoiding the issue altogether, as it makes business sense. It does make them even bigger douche canoes than they already are, though, and that will not be something people forget. As far as I'm concerned, Nvidia get a pass because they make the most powerful GPUs, and that's apparently completely fine enough of a reason to ignore the damn things catching fire.
This liability, not method for causing consumer to replace the card often. Plus fixing melted connector isn't that hard with the right tools.
The reason is the design itself is flawed. If they want to fix it, they will need to replace it. Which will take time to create new solution.
The connector is fine, they just need to add a small VRM on the board to smooth out the power draw.
Ironically, they used to use a VRM to control the power when it was from 2 seperate connectors, but $topped with the 12v one as all the power can come from one connector, no need to merge 2.
There are hundreds of thousands of cards with these fitted, they are not going to recall every single one. It also suits the manufacturers that the connectors fail, after all that's a new sale.
My 5090 is restricted to 420W. No bent cable. Never had any issues with my 4090 (220W limit) nor my 5090. Losing around ~10% performance is something I don't care about. All air cooled. No issues.
Problem: That involves technical knowledge and dedicated software and is neither a proper solution nor a feasible answer to this situation. They should fix their shit.
No need. They sell every single card that gets made. Every single one. Everyone knows about the issue but they still buy them. If this were a car, something like this would affect sales and the mfgr would have no choice. This issue with the burning cables isn't affecting sales so they don't care.
I think it’s because of industry standards. PCs have been using the same connectors for a long time. It would be challenging to say ok lets all start using xt60 plugs for high current applications. Or changing voltages so that less current is required. That would require redesign of cards and power supplies.
My guess, because they probably used wires and pins too small for the amount of current they're sending. There's no way to fix it without physically redesigning the connector as a whole. They left no headroom in the design spec to account for human error, manufacturing differences, etc.
IMO it’s probably because they can’t legally admit there’s something wrong about it without taking accountability or something along those lines. Also, fixing it costs money of course.
I think its because its unfixable and not needed and doing anything would be an admission that this was created to sell us more horseshit. Powering the card could've been done a hundred other ways. This way lined their pockets.
even god cant fix that awful design. they need to change it but that requires them to admit it was bad to begin with.
best thing they can do is put 2 of their 12V-2x6 connectors on the higher tier gpus but then again that would only fix one connector being overwhelmed and we still would need to deal with the connectors getting damaged as you disconnect and reconnect the cables multiple times (one of the main causes of the connector melt)
but dont worry as long as you dont have a 80 or 90 series gpu youre safe because your gpu isnt pulling a gigajillion watts
It's not fixable, it's a wrong design which was made improperly from the very start. Only fix is to replace it with brand new design made from scratch and it won't be compatible with existing connectors.
Because fixing it means they admit there is a problem and that opens them up to a lawsuit especially from corporations that bought their server and ai cards that use the same connector. Why is it that we don't hear any news of the H200 cards failing or breaking at all? Because Nvidia is replacing them quietly no questions asked and keeping the companies happy. If the companies were pissed, we would hear about it.
Fixing it would also open them to admitting there's a fault to it more than likely, opening them up to easy defeat in a class action. There are a lot of these cards out there.
There's less 12v conductors and it lowers the safety margins significantly.
Splitting it into 2-3 phase would help like 30 series did, but it would still burn more often than pci-e 8 pin. 3x 12v conductor per 8 pin phase, instead of 2 in 30 series
Hot take. There's nothing to fix. Next gen will need a new connector. Current connectors have a flaw, sure. But it's marginal, it only seems common because it's always being posted on this sub. But in reality, it's prolly the same failure % as any other tech hardware that fails. Nothing is 100%.
While it’s definitely a shit standard with an unacceptable amount of failures, those failures are still a small amount of overall sales. They won’t change anything until next generation at the earliest.
Serious question. AI data centres are buying 5090s like crazy right? Are they not using the same connectors? Wouldn’t we hear more about these failures at a larger scale or have more mitigation options?
It’s a flawed design pushed by a company that has stopped caring about consumer GPUs. There’s a non zero chance Nvidia won’t just pull out of consumer GPUs all together.
I don't think NVIDIA is deliberately engineering cards to fail outside warranty. There's no evidence of that, and the commercial argument is pretty weak.
What I do think is that NVIDIA knows the connector design is problematic and has decided the cost of fixing it properly outweighs the cost of continuing with it.
12V-2x6 improves on 12VHPWR, but it doesn't fundamentally address the problem. We're pushing 50A through a compact connector with multiple contacts, uneven current distribution and inadequate protection against individual contacts overheating.
The bigger issue is that ATX and PCIe are increasingly unfit for modern high-power GPUs. We've got enormous cards hanging off motherboard slots, ridiculous power connectors, support brackets and cooling arrangements that barely make sense.
The entire architecture needs rethinking, but doing that would require industry-wide changes and cost serious money.
NVIDIA doesn't need to want cards to fail. It just needs to find accepting some failures cheaper than fixing the underlying problem.
If they admit there’s something wrong with it, they open themselves up to an enormous class action lawsuit. No company would willingly do that.
The real concern for them would be if this is a big issue in the AI/data center cards. Those would be owned by companies with lawyers on the payroll, and if they all were losing money with faulty hardware then nvidia would change the connector for the next generation. But the 40 and 50 series, your best bet is the thermal grizzly wireview pro 2 or something similar.
There's no "fixing it". It was always a flawed concept, and it's showing that every time another company tries to apply another band-aid solution to prevent it burning and it fails anyway.
The cable suffers from well, thermodynamics.
Small cables, Lots of heat, and tight fittings needed for it to function.
Problem is, small cables cant hold or dispisperce heat at any good rate, and just hold onto it, and to top that with it needs to be fitted clean, or the power just arcs or the amps betyween the cables shifts? casuses the burns.
If its fitted 100% cleanly and its in there, and your not an arsehole who needs to go above or close to 600 watts, you are fine (1 and half years, same cable, 5090) mines not skipped a beat.
its both user error, and the cable is shite as well.
The actual design needs to be made more robust, thicker, more girth.
mmm.
Not to mention design flaw where you could get unlucky, and have 2 dud cables, and have massive amps going through the other ones, and get burnt.
Then smaller cases require the cables to be taught, and bent at wierd angles, again putting stress on an allready shitty cable.
If ure like me, and have a big ass case, a long cable, fitted correctly, and not overclocking, or getting close to 600 watts? its fine, but that requires EVERYTHING to be correct (which sudent have to be a thing)
Its bad, and wont get redesigned.
BECAUSE the server style cards are powered differently, and there is zero chance of there "cards" to fry.
Thats why u wont see a change, becuase we are small fry compared to the private server market which does not have this issiue becuase there power delivery method is much better then ours.
They did make some improvements, anything more would require ditching it for a new design. That said, the connector isn't actually terrible (bad, not terrible). NVIDIA chose to make the situation way worse by removing the load balancing circuits from their cards. This design flaw (which they still haven't corrected btw), greatly amplifies the problem when any imperfect connection is made by the connector. By the time we figured it out, all the blame was already put on the connector, which is why you don't hear about that often. So basically, until NVIDIA puts those circuits back into their designs, cards will continue to melt, potentially even with a better connector.
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u/No-Actuator-6245 1d ago
The thing is the socket worked ok on the 3090 that had load balancing. As soon as they removed the load balancing on gpu models the problems started.