The Truth About NVIDIA’s RTX 4090 Adapters: Testing, X-Ray, & 12VHPWR Failures

it's currently at 258 degrees I think we see the smokesty you see the smoke Andrew can you see it okay did you did you get the shot this is the best connector in the world look at it [Music] we made it melt actually we made multiple mouths we got one of these connectors over 250 degrees Celsius without any overclocking resulting in the boiling bubbling plastic that you're seeing and all the smoke that's pouring out of it and that one that you just saw was actually the one that Igor's lab recently heralded as the potentially safer of the supply cables for 12 volt high power so we've been working on this story for a few weeks rather than fly blind and theorize on what might be the problem we've been trying to create the problems in the lab this included sending our cables out to a failure analysis lab which produced some of the x-rays and scanning electron microscope shots you're seeing now in addition to spectrometry and chemical composition testing they also mounted a damaged connector that we sent in in epoxy and then cross-sectioned it for a clear picture further we collected failed and working cables from two major adapter suppliers via our audience including an ntk connector with 150 volt wiring I then worked with Patrick to perform additional testing in the house while using the failure analysis Labs work to guide us in the correct direction and we think we finally have some answers as to what's going on with these cables and what it means to you this was one of our most expensive video series to produce this year in terms of time cost it was two videos now this should be about the final one other than some quick follow-ups will do and uh it was all worth it just to do the right thing and try and root cause this issue and get to hard answers on it we brought you this extensive video via store.gamersaccess.net for the next week only use code this is fine for 10 off the GN store at checkout our 3D coaster packs and the brand new debug pack are in stock and shipping Now featuring the four unique drink coasters that you're seeing with high quality flexible materials that are easy to clean we also have stock of the GN large mod Max which notably are heat resistant for Tube Bending and great for PC building with wiring diagrams screw tracking grids and for protecting your components as they are anti-static and include grounding Hardware finally you should also check out some of our Mouse mats like the black and blue wireframe mouse mat or the red and black HUD mouse mat find stuff from the store helps to fund these deep Dives that we do and to pay for all the staff time and Equipment costs that we incurred during the process go to store.gamersaccess.net and use code this is fine alright so this video is going to be dense and packed with a lot of scientific information some really cool testing and actual failure that we were able to produce on the cables plus failure analysis lab external testing super cool stuff and the goal for this is to be extremely clear and direct and give everyone firm notes to take home about what does all this actually mean about the cable no more Theory craft no more uh just straight up fear in the headlines we're focusing on trying to get everyone some answers so first off the frequency of occurrence this is important to put things in perspective so while there have been frequent Reddit posts on like the PC Building subreddits you've likely seen a number of these connectors fail at this point and burn up so we did some digging and working with board Partners collecting information just from viewers and also talking to Cable suppliers we were able to ascertain through those Nvidia partners that they believe the failure rate is about 0.05 to 0.1 percent right now and of course Nvidia May provide more context to that later what cables can fail is the next thing we need to answer the short answer is all of them can fail so this is they're all capable of melting like you've seen online and that's because there's a few modes of failure that we're going to go through today and one of them involves user error Igor's lab recently reported some findings on suppliers and we disagree with many of the conclusions in those statements we're going to get to that but the supplier side information is accurate so there's Astron which is the officially sanctioned Nvidia supplier Nvidia hires them they work with them directly that's the one that's making it that's supposed to be making the cables that are used by and large by 4090s there's another supplier called ntk and ntk also subcontracts to A supplier called three con so there's basically three that are really in play here there's one officially sanctioned there's one that board Partners like Zotac have opted to use for some of their connectors and relating to all this Igor stated the following quote by the way I now only use the ntk adapters privately and have not had a single failure with them quick Interruption here Igor has not had a single failure period so the units that he talked about previously were units he tore apart to theorize why a failure might happen but those units did not in fact fail unless something's changed in the last 12 hours or so continuing the quote of course it would be somewhat speculative to make a blanket statement as to whether this is pure coincidence or really indicates a better quality of contact but I already feel a little safer and for the gaming system thank goodness I have a native cable on the power supply I already wrote the adapters should only be a real emergency solution at this point we've made cables from multiple suppliers fail that includes Astron that includes the favorite here ntk Additionally you can make Native 12 volt high power cables fail there have been some from users online but with the testing we're doing today you'll see why it can happen to anyone including cable mod for example for their upcoming cables so they're all prone to failure however the failure in general is overwhelmingly uncommon based on the statistics that we have today and many of the failures are actually very easily avoidable not all of them but the vast majority are let's get into that here's what makes them fail as quickly as possible we'll go into supporting evidence in a moment so one of them for an object debris in the table this is caused by improper manufacturing or by scraping of the bumps within the connector combined with high current and or poor connection pins can scrape on the bumps of the connection and create debris that can heat up inside the plastic by creating poor points of contact this is something we had validated by a third party failure analysis lab additionally another point of failure would be extremely improper insertion by the user which we posited in our original piece to recap our statements there we basically said it could be user error at the time we weren't able to create that scenario we have now we'll talk with that and even if it is user error at some point it's like if the design is so bad that it incur images user error with any amount of regularity then it is a combination of user error plus design error so the last point we had as a potential failure is improper insertion in combination with a taut wire on one or more pins causing at least one point of poor contact that heats rapidly and melts as a result of a parallel High Resistance conductive path we made this animation to help demonstrate what we mean inside the connector housing and show what we're really talking about what we're going to test later to be very clear these are not theories the two about improper insertion by the user those we have tested ourselves and caused the failure the one about for an object debris is from a failed connector from a user that we sent in to an fa lab just want to be really clear because a lot of stuff out there is Theory crafting and we want to make sure this isn't mistaken for that those are facts we have created those failures here all right it's had enough it's got a distinct odor in effort of continuing to responsibly report on it our sample size is small here in the original story we worked on five cables in this one we have one failed adapter donated by a viewer that we've crossed sectioned with the help of the fa lab that a different viewer works at and we have two failed adapters and counting that we've created in the house tonight for the adapters you can get 12 volt high power native cables to fail as well and what we have here is a representative sample but even so we can't say that the findings apply to literally every single failed 12 volt high power connector out there but we do think that this accounts for probably the vast majority of failures at this point also we strongly caution against basing conclusions off of connectors which haven't failed to examine a connector that hasn't melted and conclude that's why it melted doesn't make any sense it's creating a reality which does not exist oh it smells bad all right oh oh yeah now we have smoke okay we got some good smoke I think I think you see the smoke yeah I think you see it you can see it bubbling let's move into debunking some of these so weak solder joints is the first one this is an older Theory and uh in this one cross sectioning one failed adapter revealed one solder joint with a lack of fillet on the 12 volt side of the plug but not on the heat damaged pin our lab contacts dismissed this as the root cause since the bond still looks strong it shows that no sign of heat damage and it's reinforced by The Strain relief he also noted that the solder appears to be a tin silver alloy used for high temperature applications so this particular failure was not caused by weak solder joints each plastic pin on the male side of nvidia's adapter cable contains a conductive metal socket each of these metal sockets is split down the middle with three dimples on each side when inserted into the GPU the two halves of each metal socket act as leaf springs that hold the six dimples against a metal pin on the GPU side this provides provides a path for electricity spectroscopic analysis shows the metal parts of the connector contain a copper layer which is then coated with nickel as an adhesion layer then 10 as an outer protective layer note 0.7 and 0.8 in this image of the burned connector as well the visible outer coating is mostly 10 with some carbon baked on now every adapter cable that we've received with RTX 4090 is for review I've used the Astron style connector that Nvidia officially is supporting and that's the dimple type connector with the split sockets it's the one that's supposed to be shipping especially with the Fe cards we do have an ntk style one that's been called the Tulip style at least via translation from Igor and that one we received from a viewer but they are not the default Nvidia specified cable it's one that's been sourced as a second Supply examination of the Astron adapters melted or otherwise reveals that the tin and nickel layers are immediately scraped away through normal use revealing copper underneath as you can see in this overlay the tin layer in blue has been pushed aside and the copper layer in Orange is visible over time the copper will oxidize here raising the resistance and our failure analysis lab contact wasn't particularly happy about the build quality of the cable specifically the lack of durability is what he was dissatisfied with but he also made it clear that oxidation would be a much longer term process than what we're looking at right now today and then the failures we're investigating oxidation is not the cause of our melted adapter according to our contact now this next theory is one we had a lot of requests to test and it was initially posited by buildzoid we thought it was one of the best and most sensible theories early on and we worked with buildzoid on doing some testing for this particular one a couple of other ideas and note of course he doesn't have access to cables or cards so we were able to sort of be the the proxy for that now his theory was that the Double Split terminal at the end where if you look at the end of the cable you see it splits in two spots and he thought that perhaps as those get Pride farther apart from maybe wiggling at the end of the connector on the video card that could cause a failure and all the testing we did for that resulted in the same thermals we saw in our stock cable testing so it effectively eliminated this Theory from the list of most probable causes perhaps it could happen we however were not able to recreate this failure despite spending hours like actually a couple days pushing the splits farther apart and testing over and over now he next suggested we do this we cut all of the 12 volt pins off except for two and then we ran it under a 600 watt load the result was the same for thermals as before more or less couple degrees Max so what we mean is we ran all the power from these four eight pins into just two 12 volt pins on the actual connector that's a hell of a lot of strain on too presumably you go down to one and it might behave the same way it did not fail though and in fact it didn't even really heat up so as for the question of his thermal imaging sufficient the answer is yes and uh not only because we stuck probes in onto the 12 volt pins internally but also because we'll show you because we have the same question and this is what it looks like when it fails next to what it looks like when it was cut and working normally and you could see that with a failure is extremely clear when it's going to happen it ramps incredibly fast I guess it's a thermal runaway pretty quickly so the fact that the cable survived with all the current going through two fully seated pins properly connected told us that it's unlikely that the cable Standalone is at fault but no properly connected there so that led us to potentially another catalyst so now that we've rolled out some of the most obvious theories that have been sort of discussed the last few weeks let's build our own Theory based on sort of the evidence and the data we've collected here after discussion with our failure lab contact the most likely cause in at least the viewer cable that we're looking at that failed is heat generated through a parallel High Resistance conductive path in other words in addition to the normal and intended dimple to pin connections Across The Mating surfaces there was also some weak unintentional connection with high resistance along the same path this can occur on the ntk Tulip style connectors as well a high resistance means heat and multiple cycles of that means that eventually you're going to have a toasted connector and there are a couple of ways that a parallel path could form x-ray analysis of the adapter did show fod or foreign object debris molded into the rubber strain relief around the solder joints but it was not enough to cause a short and it was in a different area than the one where damage occurred the debris are the dark specs scattered around the inside of the strain relief in these images we've already shown that the tin and nickel coating of the adapter is scraped off through normal use which could leave debris floating around the socket our contact also noted metal Burrs left over from manufacturing on the melted adapter particularly on the end of the metal socket now this was the theory that our contact originally favored that is until we were able to do some more in-house testing tonight and finally reveal some more about potentially a mixture of user error and design maybe oversight shortcoming also coming into play now regardless of what actually formed that connection we know that something did because the X-ray shows us it did and so does the the part where there was fire the tip of the metal socket and the melted connector is Ground Zero this is significant because the tip of the metal socket isn't intended to connect to anything that's what the dimples are for the presence of a paralyzed material and electrical damage at the tip of the connector is the Smoking Gun that we were looking for EDS or energy dispersive x-ray spectroscopy analysis shows that the burnt materials are organic in in the chemistry sense I mean containing carbon that means it could be the remains of debris from the plastic connector our contacts theory was this quote for a moment in time the sinked current through this fod exceeded its current carrying capacity which melted and deposited the material at that location and likely to the pin side too then if a higher parallel resistance were made through the melted fod the connector pin and socket would continue to heat through Power dissipated through that point this was what I think occurred for this connector that's one sentence by a viewer socket based on our observations above now we also identified some dense material inside the damaged connector mostly 10 with some nickel this is plating but our failure analysis lab contact believes it's probably plating from the GPU pin side rather than the adapter according to him quote the fact that we see tin and nickel with no copper means that the tenor nickel had a clean separation from the base metal copper that phenomenon can happen with contaminants present during the nickel plating process or oxidation of the base metal prior to nickel plating to really firmly make all this concrete we would need that viewers 40 90 but unfortunately we don't have it because they want it understandably and they're getting it replaced as we understand it so that's as far as that particular analysis can go a delaminating plating isn't good if that's what's happening here uh but based on our other findings we don't believe it's the cause of melting or at least not the primary one as we said there's one major last piece of the puzzle and that's the partial insertion of the connector this is the one we had previously conducted some testing on for our first piece but we noted we weren't able to create a failure now in that testing the partial connection was approximately I can't plug it into that when it's melted uh it's going to show it but it was approximately one millimeter of uh connectors sticking out meaning it was primarily inserted with one millimeter remaining before it fully clicked into place that's what we did originally it's enough for someone to feel like it's connected properly but to not be so it provides some resistance doesn't fully click because these cables don't really click which is part of the potential design oversight we think but it's enough that we thought it was a reasonable use case where someone would not properly install it but also a an experienced user could make that mistake still so that didn't cause the failure initially it would now even we also tried pulling it to the side where we basically strained the cable really hard on one side we had about one and a half to two millimeters Exposed on the farthest set of two or three pins and that also did not produce a failure so what we were missing then was we didn't know just how poor the contact has to be it's bad and we can prove that some of the failed connectors that you've seen online were leaving upwards of four to four and a half millimeters of the cable end unsocketed as for proving it here's where the forensics come into play there are clear wear lines on the damaged connector that was sent to us by a viewer which imply that the adapter was only inserted four millimeters on the better side out of a total of six and a half millimeters and the plastic pins on the adapter are bent sharply at that point implying that the connector softened and was pulled sideways and remember it's heating up so softening here of course makes sense and that's away from the a at the end of the Nvidia logo and down towards the 12 volt side of the adapter we've seen photos of other failed cables online on Reddit and we've seen identical wear marks on some of the connectors that we've been able to source with that in mind we set out to recreate that problem working with Patrick and Andrew late at night tonight here's how that went so this is this is climbing very fast this normally takes like probably 15-20 minutes to get to 50 something degrees you can see there's a really hot spot there so we are probably going to get a melting cable this time 57 degrees the connector is hotter than the GPU are you saying fortnite players are the kind who would not socket the cable correctly I don't know how many watts you can pull with fortnite so all right this is not over shockingly it's actually worse than the last one the last one we had to overclock and push 600 watts through to get to 112 plus degrees don't want to overclock this one first yeah that's our pocket oh I see you applied it oh oh yeah see okay yeah it's not done yet uh you might be done 154. holy 157 Jesus Christ sexy it's 163 degrees right now uh 65 . yeah this is with the this is why you don't jump to conclusions without testing this is the cable that's the best the supply doesn't matter if you don't plug it in and this is where we get to the part where some people in the audience might be unhappy because you've been hearing Theory after theory about how basically Nvidia is either evil or incompetent or both and it's looking like there's a little bit more to it than just that this time that the 40 80 16 gigabyte I don't know so this problem isn't unique to a specific k or a specific manager or ders versus native cables this is just all it requires is the ability to power the card on without a fully seated cable and there is a point where it just won't turn on if it's too unseated but that point is until pretty late in the unseating process on Igor's piece his newest one he reported that the sense pins might get shortened via PCI Sig which would help with this problem another thing that would help is if they Implement a simple detection circuit basically that detects if it's seated or not and that is doable it's on cables so our conclusion here our database one is that cables are melting when the connector is partially unseated we've finally been able to recreate it but it required being very unseated and also pulling the cable at an angle because we tested it unseated without pulling it at an angle it didn't fail even when it was equivalently unsocketed so pulling it at the angle so that the gpu's metal pins are in contact by the tip of the metal socket rather than the intended mating service is what caused it on the two failures we did tonight in our experiments this happened at the inner radius of the bent this shares some ground with the fod theory as well which is a weak High Resistance path for current and parallel with the intended path as stated by our lab contact quote this partial insertion and angling of the pin into the socket could have increased susceptibility for a high resistance parallel connection at the lip of the socket if there's any Burrs or debris like from connection hanging off the lip of that it could make things worse as well so the reason we couldn't get it to fail with less Bend and more inserted but still incorrect socketing was because this path was not created and additionally it may take substantially more time for the slightly improper connection to cause a failure whereas the truly bad I mean you'd really have to be an experienced user for this connection would only take minutes to start failing there are multiple reasons though those reasons are for an object debris the foreign object debris could be caused by manufacturing error or by Design oversight itself and like with the dimples to pin contact you can create some of that or there could be some that's already in there or it could come from the user scenario but users environment but either way for an object debris one another one heat generated through a parallel High Resistance conductive path caused by foreign object debris another one extremely bad user error like bad contact in combination especially with a taut wire that causes the bad uh sort of pin the terminal contact we were talking about earlier and to recap the earlier part all 12 volt high power cables can fail in at least one of these methods probably multiple because fod can happen in either case although maybe there's more error at one factor or another but certainly user error can happen in all of them and that was something we tried exploring we just didn't know the uh the level of effort it would really take to make it show itself failures are rare they are fewer than uh like 0.1 percent at this point as we calculated earlier based on the information we have available today uh this leads into commentary on some of the Igor's lab's research on ntk versus Astron connectors don't go trying to chase down a specific adapter it's a Fool's errand is a waste of your time uh and we're greatly concerned that the anxiety around this issue is causing more failures because people are out there unsocketing their connectors all the time checking it did it did it melt yet is it gonna melt is it starting to melt and we're worried that because the easiest to create failures are from foreign object debris which happens from insertion cycles and that's not we don't think that's the most common failure to be extremely clear about that but it is one that you can create for an object debris or user error which is also from insertion Cycles we're worried that a lot of people are out there checking it and potentially creating a problem by being careless with it we're just getting unlucky and having the wire be a little bit more taut next time than the first time purely objectively with our findings with these numbers the failures we have we believe you should feel comfortable using a 12 volt high power connector in general but it requires and is critical that you connected and seated fully you should not be able to see anything between the bottom of where sort of the whole housing comes together there shouldn't be any Gap in there between the connection of the cable on the connector also avoid pulling the cable taut especially as we said towards sort of that a on the Nvidia a logo now other than manufacturing defects with for an object debris on the user error side of problems we think that most of them look like the footage you're seeing now this level of connection did not get even a little bit warmer in testing than fully socketed tests but it isn't secure we think it's possible that a user routing the cables and managing them in this stage could lead to inadvertently loosening this connection because it feels secure but it's not actually latched it needs a much firmer push to get into the socket to be sure yours is latched push until it's uncomfortable and you can't walk it out like we can in this shot it's also possible that cables slightly walk themselves out with vibration from all the computer fans but most likely it starts out acceptable but Incorrect and accidentally gets tugged to being meltable finally just a really as brief as possible monologue about responsible reporting here the last couple weeks have been incredibly difficult for us to do this testing and it's because of the landscape around us that was driven by just reporting that really wasn't up to the research par that it needs to be for a matter this serious um and it's uncomfortable for me to add this monologue section because it involves some constructive criticism of our peers whom we like so that's a little bit of a challenge and uh We've encountered this multiple times now with responsible reporting and trying to create reasonable discourse and when you have people screaming at the top of their lungs all of these really sensationalized headlines uh and claiming that they found the problem when in fact they have no proof of finding the problem it makes it hard for us to come in later and to have that reasonable discourse with the audience because we're entering basically a pre-loaded Minefield of opinions that may not align with the reality of testing so whenever this stuff blows up there's a lot of pressure where people start pinning us and saying when are you going to cover it this is not a Woe Is Us thing we are so thrilled to have that because people are engaged they want to hear what we think we we really appreciate you actually caring about what it is we do and wanting to see that because it's exciting to us to work on it too but because of that we just want you to know that if we're like a week or two weeks late to something and everyone's posting all these things about why a failure is happening but they haven't actually produced it know that we are trying to and we're in the lab trying to desperately keep up with theories which is very hard to do when you're limited by testing speed especially for heat based scenarios where it takes time so that's really all there is to the monologue um it's not meant to be a slight on others I like Jay like working with them like hanging out with them I like his content I've met Igor at computax got along with them pretty well we've talked to the past about his work and it's just it's been a frustrating month to cover this story it means we have to wade into an environment that is pre-loaded with a lot of opinions and a fiery audience that is misinformed or only partially informed and that makes it hard for us to do our job because then we enter it and if our opinion doesn't match the theories that don't have testing back in them it's like suddenly we are de facto apologists of the company if we are unable to produce those failures based on those theories that's my TED Talk thanks for coming um it's not meant to be like like I'm not trying to take away from the content for this but I did need to say it at this point because it's become a problem lately so that's why if we're late now you know thanks for watching though hopefully that Recaps it well for you subscribe for more as always you can support us directly by going to store.gamersaccess.net and using Code this is fine for 10 off anything on the store for the next week or so subscribe for more we'll see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 1,890,502

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, nvidia rtx 4090 12vhpwr, nvidia rtx 4090 16 pin, nvidia rtx 4090 12 pin, nvidia 12 pin safe, nvidia 12vhpwr melting, nvidia 12 pin fire, rtx 4090 fire, pcie 5 cable safe

Id: ig2px7ofKhQ

Length: 30min 31sec (1831 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 16 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Nestledrink]

Summary -- Please watch the ENTIRE video. Informative content.

• Per Nvidia partner: Failure rate is 0.05% - 0.1%. Nvidia may provide more context on this later
• Any of them "can" fail because there are a few mode of failures and one of them involves user error
• Confirmed 2 Manufacturers
  • Astron
  • NTK
    • Also subcontracted to Tricon?
• Failure in general is overwhelmingly uncommon and many of the failures are very easily avoidable
• What are the causes?
  • Foreign object debris in the cable
    • Caused by improper manufacturing and scraping of the bump combined with high current and or poor connection
    • Creating poor points of contacts
  • Extremely improper insertion by user
  • Improper insertion in combination with a taut wire on one or more pins
    • Causing one point of poor contact that heats up
• GN also went on to debunk several theories out there. Not going to summarize them. Please watch to understand some of the misinformation out there
• Conclusion:
  • Cables are melting when connector is unseated
  • It requires being very unseated AND pulling the cable at an angle
    • Did not fail when tested unseated but not being pulled at an angle
  • "Partial insertion and angling of the pin into the socket could have increased susceptibility for a high resistance parallel connection at the lip of the socket" - Failure Analysis Lab Testing sent to GN
  • Any debris will make this worse
  • Failures are rare
  • Don't chase specific adapter as any of them can fail
  • Anxiety surrounding the issue might exacerbate the issue
    • When people are unplugging and re-plugging, it could create foreign object debris (not common)
    • User error when re-plugging the connector
  • Purely objectively, GN feels you should be comfortable using 12VHPWR connector but it requires them to be fully connected and seated (Critical)
    • There should not be any gap
    • Push the cable until you can't wiggle it out anymore (GN gave an example of how he could pull the seemingly fully inserted cable out by wiggling it out -- this is an indication that the cable is NOT fully seated)

Added to Megathread

[u/Pro4TLZZ]

So the top likely failure cause is from incorrect insertion.

Another failure cause but less likely is from foreign object debris from manufacturing.

[u/micro_jackson_]

Information with actual reasearch, testing and evidence. I tip my hat to GN.

[u/CynicalPlatapus]

Tl;dw all cables are susceptible, even the cablemod ones

And the cause seems to be mostly user error, with some poor design and manufacturing error thrown in

It could also be argued the user error is caused by poor design

[u/Pro4TLZZ]

Thanks I was waiting for someone to post this as I couldn't

[u/xxredees]

Cablemod has taken advantage of this issue real good lol.

[u/Ar0ndight]

Finally some clarity. GN once again doing the work.

Estimation of failures is 0.05% to 0.1%. Basically it's mostly user error with connectors that aren't fully seated (design oversight on the adapters that should have a clear audible click). Fringe cases of connectors with internal debris causing contacts where there shouldn't be.

[u/BlizzMonkey]

Lmao, Cablemod making bank on user errors.

[u/TheBlack_Swordsman]

I know one conclusion I support. Igor's lab is not a good source for these "fear gate" news. The guy jumps the gun and is wrong often.

Capacitor gate, cable gate. What next Igor?

Thank god we have Steve GN, Johnny Guru, etc.