After a somewhat prolonged period of silence, NVIDIA was ready to speak about the critical issue of its melting 12VHPWR or 16-pin Gen5 power connectors plaguing the brand’s new GeForce RTX 40 Series graphics cards. By that, we mean it has released an official statement on the matter.
Coincidentally, NVIDIA’s statement on the melting 12VHPWR connectors comes just after the TechTube channel, GamersNexus, also released a video of its finding, after a week-long testing period, whereby the channel attempted to reproduce the issue. As it turns out, the case of the melting connectors was only a problem if either the cable’s head is not inserted correctly or, in some rare cases, the connector head is tainted with some debris stuck to it, possibly during the manufacturing process.
“Our findings to date suggest that a common issue is that connectors are not fully plugged into the graphics card. To help ensure the connector is secure we recommend plugging the power dongle into the graphics card first to ensure it’s firmly and evenly plugged in, before plugging the graphics card into the motherboard,” said NVIDIA’s official statement via its support page.
As for how many cases of the melting 12VHPWR connector issue it has received, NVIDIA says that that number is currently limited to just 50 cases, globally. For that matter, the company also says that upon testing the affected RMA’ed cards, it noticed a “wear line” that is clearly visible on the connector, indicating that the cable wasn’t fully inserted in its card’s 16-pin port.
On that note, NVIDIA says that it will continue to honour all RMA requests that pertain to the 12VHPWR issue, but as GamersNexus points out, the aforementioned global number of cases is still very, very low. By its estimates, the Techtuber channel puts that number at 0.04% of all GeForce RTX 4090 cards sold, which is approximately 125000 units, at the time of writing.
(Source: Videocardz, NVIDIA, GamersNexus)
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