The 12VHPWR adapter cable is DANGEROUS! But NVIDIA doesn't agree...

back in September I talked about the uh 12 volt high power cable found on 40 series graphics cards to be a little bit of a concern not of my own but just because of what people were already saying in the industry it's funny because it ruffled a bunch of feathers it ruffled some feathers with some Engineers it ruffled nvidia's feathers quite a bit and then this popped up on Reddit this picture of this burned connector right here and of course I have a ton of emails in my inbox of people saying you were right you were right first of all I wasn't right all I was doing was putting out information that was being sent to me by people in the know behind the scenes before the 40 series launch in this connector is a problem when I put that video out Brandon Bell had this to say the very first sentence in this email says I just saw the video you posted and I think you're worrying about issues that don't exist he goes on to say we have thoroughly tested our power adapters and expect no issues and potential customers who are concerned can use the RTX 40 series connector solution with confidence ends such email by saying there's nothing to worry or Panic about it all just works man today's video is brought to you by the json's merch store we got t-shirts and gaming mats and mugs and all that kind of stuff so whenever you go buy our stuff we want to put other ads here and other annoying crap so go buy our stuff so if you don't follow Reddit or whatever um a user by the name of uh Reggie ga Kill got kill or whatever I don't know he has a 4090 he has a 12 volt power adapter which has the four adapt uh pigtails coming off I don't have one handy you think I would because I have the 490 right here and he's had it in his system and he said he was actually gaming and then started smelling and seeing smoke from his graphics card and from the connector it started to melt so we put he put up a couple pictures here of the both the GPU connector itself and then the adapter connector uh and what you can see right here is this is a heat related issue this is this these pins clearly got hot now remember the 12 pin connector here is designed up to a spec of 600 watts in fact what I think you should also do at the end of this video is go and watch buildzoid's video he actually does a really good piece about nvidia's typical over complication of design and yes we know Nvidia did not develop this plug it was actually a collaborative effort between Intel and PCI sigm or PCI Sig is the one that comes up with the standard for PCI cables and Intel really pushed it and apparently Nvidia really also pushed it and adapted it and wanted to solve a non-issue of having these bigger power connectors which we've seen for over a decade did this itty bitty little tiny one which apparently solves a problem of space that wasn't even an issue to make it nice and tidy but the problem is now you've got a lot of amps traveling through very tiny pins and as you can see in this particular use case here this graphics card gave up the magic smoke at least some sort of smoke the card still works now I want to reiterate some things here my concern initially I didn't even have the cards in hand when I made that video yet I like I said I had information that people were writing me saying hey this is a problem in fact let's not forget Nvidia even posted an email to pcie Sig themself about concerns of melting connectors both at the GPU side and the power supply side now we don't have any ATX 3.0 psus in hand yet and we will obviously be testing it but you have to remember if you're currently using any 12 volt high power connector that connects to an ATX 2.0 power supply it is like half smart and we've already showed you how depending on which connectors and sense wires are plugged in on the four sideband connectors you'll get a different power limit available to your card so it's one of those things where I have no idea if this user was overclocking this card I have no idea if he didn't just max the power slider we have no idea however I can tell you none of the power supplies or the graphics cards that we've looked at yet exceed the 600 watt available power limit now this connector if designed inspect properly should be able to run 600 watts all day long every day because it's within the spec it should be able to handle that but we're starting to see more people now uh and this is not the first person this is actually the first one that's kind of gone viral on Reddit that's having a problem with their connector but initially people were like what would you do with your connector did you bend it real tight because we've already shown that every single 40 90 on the market if you put it in your your case horizontal as a standard install not a vertical Mount you've got to put a hell of a bend on the connector now remember nvidia's connector has a uh a heat shrink slash fabric tape around it and the reason that tape is there is not just to give some strength to where those connectors and those pins pin into the plug itself it's because of the fact that as cable mod has shown on their own website and I highly recommend you look at this that there has to be 35 millimeters of relief now what that means is there needs to be a 35 millimeters out from the plug before the bend starts and that's to keep anything from happening and torquing inside the connector that could cause either a weak connection or some sort of a short I don't think it has to do the short I think it just has to do with a weak connection for instance if you've got a male connector that has to then slot into a female pin on the other side and it's in there seated properly you have good contact if you bend it and you pull it out slightly because you as you bend it it can pull the pins out remember the cable doesn't get longer it has to make that bend and and the top side cables have a farther radius to make which means they're going to pull out on the top so if you bend it too tight you can actually pull those pins back in the connector and now instead of having a nice seated pin pulls back and you don't have as good of a contact so now you have a lot of wattage going through a lesser contact area of transfer from one pin to the other that's what I believe is happening here because even though this particular card was mounted vertical and here's a photo of what this setup looks like and you can see the plug is coming kind of straight up although it does look like it's canted to the side slightly cable mod also showed you cannot bend it sideways you cannot bend it either way flippy floppy unless you have 35 millimeters of length before the bend which by the way just about no case on the market is going to allow for 35 millimeters of relief before the bend even the giant Helios case that we were using to test none of those will allow for it because even the 4090 was not able to clear with that level of relief and it has the like lowest height of any of the custom cards all the custom cards have an even higher mount even by a few millimeters so no card is going to conform to that without being vertically mounted I have a sneaky suspicion at some point this user might have bent his cable maybe he tried to mount it horizontally it didn't work okay mount it vertical then and it worked because look at the way only the pins closest to the PCB are burned and that goes along with that theory of what I said if the card is mounted horizontally like this and only the top pins are burnt if he had bent it down and pulled those pins out and pulled those pins back in their Mount before mounting it vertical he might have an issue now where the pins are not making a great contact like I said this to me looks like it was not a current issue it looks to me like it was a contact issue with those pins because if it was a current issue I would have expected to see pretty much all of them burn because current remember travels both ways both power and ground so I would expect to see there be more burned pins there and more burnt plastic this is just burned plastic by the way the pins still work it still works the card works there's no failure anywhere in terms of solder joints or anything like that so this appears to be an issue of contact I guess that's my guess and without talking to him without having the card in hand it's not even something I want to try to recreate because let's face it these are expensive cards and I really don't want to sacrifice one to science here I would hope that whatever manufacturer this car does I'm not sure what card this was actually but do you notice how when the cable's coming up right now it's got this sideways Bend if I go back to the email from Brandon we were talking about the 30 cycle thing and that was that was kind of like the the gist of the email with Nvidia was like Hey the 30 cycle thing has been around since Molex okay Molex all the way through PCI Express as we know it now now to the 12 pin connector um the 30 Cycles has always been the spec so they kind of really got stuck on that but the fact that um you know I was basically told like the whole melting thing isn't a concern it's not a problem they'll worry about it it just works it's not aging too well man and that was on what was the date on that September 23rd hey one month and one day later guess what so the other thing is let's talk about Johnny Guru for a second here Johnny Guru is another guy that kind of went off the rails at Gamer's Nexus and us but I let that be water under the bridge um talking about how you know this is all and nobody knows what they're talking about et cetera et cetera what I think is funny is this particular quote and I believe this is from his own Discord a user asks I wonder how many power supply how many power supplies Corsair lost to prototype RTX 4090 and 490 TI's Johnny says None we just replaced the melted connectors and continue testing and I'm the crazy one so we have now documented proof with emails to PCI Sig that Nvidia has had concerns and recreated and shown melted connectors we now have Johnny freaking Guru himself that if you follow power supply is for decades he was like the go-to tester who's now an r d uh engineer for Corsair saying melted connectors now I I'm gonna I'm gonna I wish he'd gone into more detail okay why did they melt where did they melt were you testing it at 450 were you testing it at 600 did it melt on the power supply side did it melt on the graphics card side I'm I this is his statement here is very left interpretation I'm gonna assume that they were testing the spec which would be 600 watts okay because I know for a fact in his like rant in the Discord that they were they did not have a card in hand there was no cards in hand at least that's one of the complaints he had was that he didn't have a card what he was having to develop a cable for it so I'm gonna assume that maybe they were doing load testing maybe at 450 maybe at 600 but with a with a load tester and that the melted connector happened at the GPU and which is why there's no damage to the power supply now they replaced the connector and moved on so we now know that at least within the cable spec and I'm gonna hope because if they were if they were testing what happens Beyond 600 watts that wouldn't be a story you move something Beyond its spec expect the failure so that that's not a story right so I would assume that this is within spec and now this with the Reddit user and again if it shows that if you were just like bend the cable once or twice maybe too far or too tight close to the connector this can happen now what here's the funny part you remember in that video I showed how tight you had to bend it and I started to pull the heat shrink out and stuff I haven't used that connector I've never used that connector I've used the Corsair replacement cables that come for their power supply so type their Type 4 connectors for any type 4 power supply that terminates to a 12 volt high power I never use that connector and now I'm wondering if I should because I bent the crap out of it so I need to mark that one and keep it like noted that hey this is the one I've bent the crap out of because it's really starting to look like the small delicate pins which has been the concern from day one is a part of the problem here so it's interesting now that you have these big connectors that apparently were a problem this is what builds what goes into detail about he's like this this wasn't a problem to have to make these connectors smaller because you could have still had you could have still made a 10 pin or even a 12 pin I would have looked the eight pin plus four more in fact look at this right here the back of the 1080 TI Kingpin card we have two eight pin connectors now imagine if that split in the middle wasn't there and it was just one connector that size wouldn't you still take that over the current split connectors we have today in over the 12 12 volt power connector here that you know or the 12 pin power connector that exists now like if that were just a single plug and that were the new spec wouldn't you take that I would because I can't remember the last time I saw one of these Catch Fire I mean it's happened but usually it's a because of a defect and for anyone calling this particular 12 volt power connector fire issue a defects I don't know yet because of the fact that we do know that he's bent that cable slightly and I still suspect it was bent this way initially everyone bends their cables because it's part of cable management it sucks and because of the height of the the PCB now if you want to run a side panel you have to bend the cable if you're a horizontal period which now you you shouldn't do period so don't run a side panel this small thing now is going to turn into a big problem and I'm doubling down on this when I said to that our concerns about this power plug thank God this guy was there and caught it because it doesn't take much for plastic to catch fire and anything that involves fire is a problem and I am kind of calling it now this is probably going to turn into a much bigger issue involving consumer safety rather than anybody that was involved in this design taking any sort of responsibility and saying hey maybe we made a mistake with this design do you know why they can't do that because every freaking 40 series card has this plug every second every single 40 series card that's coming out that has been announced is using this plug AMD is using this plug do you know who's not using this plug Intel on their own card and they helped design the stupid thing yeah but G it's now using 600 watts doesn't matter it's about having a like continuity amongst connectors of the new spec and to help design it they're not using it maybe they're the Smart Ones maybe this was their plan all along make all the other guys burn up so they're the only card left on the market I don't know I could not care less about your opinion of me whether or not this is fear-mongering or whatnot the motive Behind these videos is a hundred percent about consumer safety anything that catches fire or has a potential of Catching Fire or something that's as delicate as this connector is carrying well apparently and I don't know how true this is this is this is something that someone said in the Reddit thread I cannot vet this for for accuracy but I'm going to put it out there anyway so somebody could look into this apparently each pin is rated to 8.5 amps on the on the power draw and Nvidia apparently has the 4090 spec at 9.5 amps per pin so that's kind of a problem if it's true but my point is this entire plug is nothing but a cluster and it's going to continue to be a cluster and I'm I'm calling it now this is going to end up being the cycle from hell this time around especially if AMD is anywhere near the power draw of a 40 90. what we're going to have to do is we're gonna have to see what happens too as a power draw goes down because I know the 4080 is probably going to be a anywhere between a 350 to 400 watt card and AMD for the love of God I hope your efficiency is better than Nvidia is because if you're at the spec of the limit per pin and what I said is true about bending the cable and having it pull the pin back and you're not making full contact because contact area is just as important as anything else when it comes to pin connection may God help you all if you're running a 40 series card just have a fire extinguisher nearby and maybe like a like a wire an Office Max or an Office Depot that's easy button to like a I'll stop on just not just connected to your breaker you hit that and it turns off the breaker I I don't know

Channel: JayzTwoCents

Views: 839,418

Keywords: 12vhpr cable, 12volt cable, 4090 melting, 4090 cable melting, 4090 power cable, nvidia power cable, will 4090s catch fire

Id: HAZWwwHScaQ

Length: 15min 20sec (920 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 24 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Split_Seconds]

Look. Nvidia. If you read this ( and I know you are ) I highly suggest making and including a 90 adapter in the box. Also, ship them out for us early adopters.

You know it's right and the only thing that can be done.

[u/8604]

Cablemod claims we need 35mm of clearance before bending the cable. Which is pretty much impossible to get in the most popular cases out there.

Did Nvidia only test this purely an openbench scenario with the cables supported? I feel like this issue should have popped up a lot more if the simple gravity of the cables leaning would cause issues.

[u/w00t692]

Someone predicted he'd make this video and it'd be 15 minutes long. Glad to see they nailed it.

[u/MagicHoops3]

I’m wondering if Corsair found some issues as well since they haven’t put any of their 40 series cables out in almost a month.

[u/SnooWoofers7345]

We need those 90 degrees adapters asap, i can't close my case either as most of the owners i guess

Maybe if we could close our cases we wouldn't be complaining about coil whine either so much.

[u/VAsHachiRoku]

What’s very annoying is cable management is the normal today so much that cases are design with specific features to help with this. It’s common sense that if a cable is seen most people want it clean looking inside the case, then leave a huge mess hidden behind panels lol!

Why Nvidia would not take the top 10 cases and ask someone built in them with a fake card that had the exact plug layout is beyond me. Hell could send this fake non working card to reviews and ask them to build and get feedback on the cable management only!

But I guess Billions of dollars just isn’t enough these days.

[u/ThatAmboGuy]

Nvidia would never admit fault, that opens it up to liability. I assume all 40 series cards have this connection and the 4090s to 4070s have already been made so financial losses from a recall would be significant.

So Nvidia better release a more secure enclosed 90degree adapter or issue a recall for these fire hazards.

[u/xPETEZx]

Seems like this all could have been avoided with better placement of the port on the GPU itself.

Why not make a recessed port at the back of the card, that supports the connector/cable and prevents needing such tight bends.

Would also look so much better.

I dont know why every GPU seems to have the connector on the side. Not only does that mean the cable HAS to be bent, but its also the ugliest spot in terms of cablemanagment.

I liked that the EVGA 3090Ti had the connector on the end of the board. Much clearner options for routing the cable.

Now I get that some will argue this would cause issues in some shorter cases... but then having these super massive, thicc and wide cards with it on the side ALSO causes issues.

​

I get why nVidida wanted this connector. 4x 8-pin would take up most of the side of a PCB.

Seems like they could have done more to ensure this cable is sturdy enough. Considering the amount of power its carrying and the risk of melting being far higher.

Seems the saftey margin has been massively cut down on this connector compared to 8-pin.

[u/Khomuna]

To think all of this could've been avoided if they just used normal PCI-e power cables.