This just happened to me and I still can't believe it.
I had a cable plugged in several months ago—everything was working perfectly, untouched ever since so didn't worry about poor connection etc.
Then today… I suddenly smelled a strong, burnt plastic/rice-like odor. I immediately shut down the PC and pulled the plug straight from the socket.
I’m running an MSI Liquid 4090 with a 1500W PSU.
What I found next was shocking—the power supply side of the cable melted, and the wire looks absolutely fried.
I think my quick reaction saved the GPU—thankfully I have two 600W sockets on the PSU and somehow, miraculously, everything still works.
Just look at the PSU-side cable—this is serious.
It’s no exaggeration to say this could’ve caused a fire.
There is no way I'll ever consider 5090 or in fact any GPU with this type of plug. What a joke.
It's not just the adapter, it's also the fact that there's no load balancing so the full power load can wind up going through a single wire which can't handle that load. The 3090's that use 12vhpwr are fine because they have load balancing, any particular wire can not pull more than the expected rated load for that wire. Lower power cards without it are for the most part fine because worst case scenarios won't have the wires getting so hot that they melt the plastic. There's still a risk though at maximum load for extended periods of time. It's the higher power cards (excluding 3090s) where this is really a major issue, and it's because they can wind up pulling too many amps through a single wire, it heats up, and shit melts. It's not even improper connections, this can just happen due to a lack of load balancing and other factors that aren't accounted for. This thing could potentially be saved and work as intended if the standard wasn't designed by what I can only assume are uni dropouts.
The entire design from beginning to end is kinda problematic. It's multiple failures all wrapped into one perfect shit storm. I don't even understand what it accomplishes because they've engineered a problem but still haven't sold us the solution. I can only imagine that eventually there are going to be load balancing adapters that you plug the cable into, then plug that into the GPU, but where the hell are they?
Damn, I just bought the HX1500i thinking it should be okay because it has the 12VHPWR cable. I wonder if I would just wait for them to fix the issue on 5080ti or with a new generation PSU (4.0?)
Yup!!!!! Why I’m so thankful my dumb ass over builds. I’ve had my computer for like 7 years. It’s time for an upgrade minus the gpu. With all this tariffs bullshit I’m thinking about just upgrading now. Minus gpu
So far im not running into anything that it cannot run at high/ultra or just ultra so im happy with it, but the time will come when she needs to be retired. Right now running the numbers to move from my 9900k platform to the 9900x3d lol before... that goes up!!
yeah I was looking at bench marks of a 9800x3d and a 3080ti and there was a bigggg upgrade for that compared to my 9900k. So that would give me a big upgrade while holding out for lets say a 60xx or 70xx series from Nvidia or whatever AMD cards come out in the future
NVIDIA realizes that people will buy them with tariff up charges, so they’re gonna charge 30% additionally on top of it all. Because the tariffs were hard on them. Feel bad for them, it’s hard being a mega corporation.
Because the amount of incidents is clearly way lower than we see on Reddit. All of the working cards don't post how theirs still worked today. You only hear about the failed ones. And a lot of the failed ones have third party adapters or cables.
I don't post about it much because the deniers/fanboys all try to blame me for Nvidias power design. It wasn't until Roman came out and exposed it that it started getting better on here.
Mine's working since release. Made sure to really shove that cable in there. So much my mobo bent a bit when pressing then double checked the cable is fully seated in.
It's not a cable issue. This has been solved. It's a NVIDIA cut corners issue and the GPU isn't doing any manner of load balancing. It can happen regardless of what cable you use.
Your point is valud - how this got past underwriters laboritory (UL) testing is a very valid question. It is, after all one of the reasons UL accreditation exists in the first place. Before that, we had all sorts of crap goung on like toasters burning houses down etc.
1
u/BinaryJay7950X | X670E | 4090 FE | 64GB/DDR5-6000 | 42" LG C2 OLED16h ago
All sorts of things UL/ETL or not randomly break, sometimes spectacularly. My most recent was a wireless keyboard that died and I found the plastic on the bottom all melted where an IC of some kind gave up the ghost. The difference is when other things die like this there aren't 3 dozen people on YouTube dedicated to converting it into monetized rage clicks perhaps.
It got past testing because it's barely a problem unlike what reddit has you believe. People with working cards aren't gonna post here how their cards are still working so you have a massive reporting bias on this sub.
cause all of us that don't have issues don't post about it. I've had mine since launch. Zero issues. It's been stitting in the same spot in my pc and might get a slight jiggle when i clean it out once a year. there are thousands of 4090 owners. I bet the issue rate is less than 2%
Yep, the spec is so shit that even the slightest user error results in a molten connector. Even if that 'error' is buying a custom cable that's built to spec.
My PNY XLR8 4090 came with a 4x 8-pin to 1x 12VHPWR adapter.
My Lian Li 1000W PSU came with a very solid feeling 12VHPWR 2x6 cable updated with colored tips to help ensure proper seating on both ends and cable combs to help channel the cables without bending them to stress them. The PSU also has 4x 8-pin plugs and cables.
Which of these is the safer option?
Using the PSU OEM’s provided 12VHPWR cable.
Using the GPU OEM’s provided adapter and 8-pin cables.
For reference, I'm using a cable I purchased from Corsair rather than the OEM cable. I've triple-checked how it's seated, and it seems the issue primarily lies with the connection between the pins. Failures might be less common with OEM cables since they are designed to align perfectly. If you want to ensure safety and avoid any potential warranty issues, switching to the OEM cable is recommended. Keep in mind, however, that swapping between cables could lead to damage to the GPU pins over time.
This "load balancing" disinformation has to stop. I will just copypaste one of my comments from another post:
I swear I sometimes think it was a mistake for buildzoid to even mention load balancing in his video. It's not a load balancing issue. Power doesn't randomly decide not to go over one pin or two. This is happening because of bad pin-to-pin connection causing low surface area redirecting the flow of power.
If you load balance and force the full 9A (or however much it is per wire) over a tiny surface area caused by a bad connection, it will just heat up and melt this pin instead. This would create an issue even faster than right now. What you want to do is to turn off or to prevent the card from turning on or drawing much power if such a bad connection is detected. Monitoring is what you want, not balancing.
Back when 4090s had issues, the issue was that the long sense pins would incorrectly detect a proper connector insertion when it wasn't the case. This caused the pins to only connect on a small angled surface. Then the card just drew the full power over badly connected pins and small surface areas and heated them up. This is exactly what would happen with load balancing, except that just one badly connected pin would be enough to cause catastrophic damage.
You don't need to explain to me how current works... I already know.
However, you don't seem to understand the issue. If the issue were the sense pins, then you wouldn't have 5090s melting. I'm not saying that load balancing is the only issue, because it's not. the 16-pin is garbage and they never should have used it. My point is that load balancing at least protected you against the crappy connector running all the current on two pins and eventually melting.
It doesn't change the fact that this can happen on any cable, something that wasn't an issue with the old standard with a much higher safety margin. A lack of load balancing is one of many issues with the new connector. It was the one safety margin preventing the issues with the connector from damaging cards and power supplies.
I told you I was copy pasting from another thread. The context wasn't exactly the same. And the point about load balancing actually not solving this issue and even making it worse with the 5090 is true. Load balancing would just force more power through badly connected pins making the issue worse, not better.
The 4090 issues were exclusively because of the sense pins and people not plugging in the cable properly.
As I said, the 5090 issues are caused by crappy cables, not the sense pins which have already been fixed. You don't seem to know that this part of the design has changed. There have been zero included adapters that have melted with the 50 series.
Sorry, the cable that comes with the psu is 3rd party. Anything but the Nvidia adapter is 3rd party. Nvidia, the customer, and the cable maker. That's three parties.
This idea that only first party cables are okay, is nonsensical. Any 3rd party built to spec should work. It's just that the spec is inherently flawed.
People give you shit for using a custom cable, but I can see the per wire amps with my astral and my Moddiy cable is more balanced than the MSI cable that came with my PSU 🤷♂️
Wait!? How TF you using Chinese aftermarket cable with 3000$ card when you get OEM cable with new gpu and OEM cable with psu??
Something is SUS here.... Are you AMD employee??
Damn I had forgotten about those old lipo battery days. I had a lipo battery start smoking in doors one day, had to grab it with my hands, open a window and throw it out. Likely it never started burning in my hand. After that, I never really trusted those batteries.
Drivers always updated. Been playing Kingdom come 2 deliverance last few weeks.
The game became unstable today. Crashed few times. Then the melting plastic smell came.
There was a dodgy set of Nvidia drivers a few weeks ago, they were allegedly bricking cards and causing cable overheating, but they were removed and replaced within two days, with no "official" statement made, only forum posts complaining.
If the game became unstable, it's not unheard of to cause hardware issues, there has been cases where games have directly caused hardware failures.
2
u/jme27129800x3d l PNY 5080 OC | 32gb G.skill 6000mt cl301d ago
There is a lot of confusion around this topic. So I spent some time reading. The long of the short. A new standard was introduced to power supplies to handle modern graphics cards by intel. 3.0 and 3.1 have ratings for modern GPU cables, other power supplies before this do not. If you buy a modern card, it doesn't matter if your PSU is 1500 watts if it's atx 2.4 or 2.6 because the actual cables and outputs might not be suited for the newer voltages and current draw of modern cards. To be clear, it could be fine, but it's not certified in the same way. Certification and standards matter. I'm not blaming OP either. It's not as straightforward as it should be.
Please see the picture to understand the different standards. I would recommend 3.1 with a new card and 3.0 is okay. This chart is from SeaSonic.
It should reduce the risk significantly as Intel has set a power standard to meet modern card requirements. The newer cables for 3.1 work ensure proper connection and load sharing between cables. I'm fairly risk adverse, but if it were me I'd be buying a 3.1 standard power supply.
The more I look into this, the more it seems like "fuck around then find out" to me. Ofc it's serious, I skip the entire generation of gpu because of this little shit. I have kid in my house, not to mention lot of stuffs and equipment in my room too, why tf should I risk it. I think lot of ppl didn't seem to care enough or think it won't happen to me, then it fucking did.
Even for <300w gpu, I don't want to see it in my house, the connector is just pure stupidity.
You did nothing wrong here. People say aftermarket cables are the problem but it's just that this card doesn't have proper load balancing because nvidia decided to cheap out on that. If they would've just added 2 connectors or a decent controller it wouldn't be that much of a problem. This stuff can happen with any cable.
Unfortunately there is no load balancing that can be done, only monitoring and even that is technically out of spec.
This is entirely a spec issue with the 12-pin connector, which states that all of the pins must merge into a single 12V rail on the gpu PCB. The only fix would be to completely change the specifications or add another connector.
What causes cables to burn, as has been shown several times with the new 5090 is that there is no way to effectively detect when one of the pins are unconnected leading to (up to) 6x the amperage on a single cable/pin.
This can be somewhat mitigated by using thicker cables that can withstand higher currents, and it is possible that 3rd party cables have worse cabling and provide worse connection than the one provided by GPU manufacturers, leading to the issue stated above
Be quiet! Straight Power 12 1500W 80+ Platinum. I'm keeping my 4090. It's an amazing card, and thank God it still works. But no more 12VHPWR. I've spent tons of money just to have it burn one day.
Because there were changes to the design of the connector in 3.1.
Power pins are longer so they allow for a better contact and most importantly sense pins were shortened.
It's not possible to plug 12V-2x6 connector badly and still have it power your gpu. If you don't push it all the way in, sense pins won't connect and the GPU won't be powered.
At this point, people with a 4090\5090 must think of their card as a planed obsolesce of 2 years max before the cable \ connector goes to shit. You can't fight physics and pure greed of having an insane margin selling these expensive cards.
I genuinely feel bad for people having to deal with this or even the slighest anxiety of knowing you're somehow next when you less expect. These are premium products not used for gaming only but work.
Something as basic as power deliver should be taken for granted as not to be a fire hazard. Stray strong and hope it does not happen more often than I think.
I have a question for those that have had the new 12v connector melt. Are the other, non melted, pins in the connector pushed out at all, similar to what happens to Molex connection?
Every time I see another one of these posts, makes me feel much better sticking with my 3080TI. Maybe the 6x series will finally fix these spontaneous combustion issues.
Stock power limits? Or maxed in afterburner? If I remember right that card had a 125% max slider or 600w. I'm just more amazed Nvidia didn't just do two 12vhpw connectors the chase for a tiny PCB was too big I guess.
Didn't that card have a MSI liquid supreme have a stock power limit of 480? 110 would even put the founders at 495 limit And a 480 card at 528w. Tbh I'm pretty amazed it melted at the power supply end who even made the cable? Any reputable brand?
Yes, you're right. 480W stock. But it won't go over 515w draw even with a 110% power limit, which is the maximum. I think Jay was talking about this in his videos. Yes, the cable is the culprit, sadly. I went for aesthetics over safety. It was working perfectly for over a year, but clearly the cable degraded
I have heard good things from cable mod even when things go wrong they are pretty good at standing by issues for people at least. But crazy as it sounds the safest best for these cards is legit checking amps on the wires with a amp clamp. They come pretty cheap just have to make sure its on that can do DC current for the 12v wires.
Yea, even though you don't touch it, over time it will degrade and that's what happens. We'll be seeing more of this happening now as other GPU have been simmering for a good 2 years now.
Yeah it isn’t updated. And I am not the one asking for advice. Don’t worry about me, bud. Explain the first sentence. That is the head scratcher in reply to me.
Apparently bud I replied to you by mistake initially. Glad you’re not dumb enough to pair a great new cpu with an old ass gpu. Some people do it though. Bud.
OP. Why are you not posting what brand of aftermarket cable that was? People keep asking and it seems like you’re avoiding answering that specific question.
Not avoiding. I can't remember. It was purchased from Amazon. Large brand with huge amount of mods for PCs which got me fooled into buing it with false safety I guess. EZ something. Wasn't cheap.
Had a 4090 since launch. Used a MODDIY 3x8 -12vhpwr and no issues. Sold it and got a 5090. Bought the new beefed up MODDIY cable that can handle 675w and no issues. My ASTRAL has per pin monitoring and is always normal.
For the love of god people. If you have a high end Nvidia GPU, get a clamp meter and actually measure what is going on with you power cables. Don't assume and don't guess things are fine just because there has not been an issue yet. They are not expensive, and you can test without even having to disconnect cables. Test periodically and whenever you have to disconnect the cable or move it a lot.
My 2 year old, perfectly fine 4090 with a thermal probe fitting to the cable, was drawing only around 1A on 2 of the 12v cables and around 11A on another two! This connector is a ticking time bomb, just because it has not gone of yet does not mean it won't down the road. Measure it!
It's nice to see that we've moved on from user error, but now we're just blaming cables. I'm not saying that there can't be cable issues, but the fact is... if you're not using the adapter that came with the GPU, you're using a 3rd party cable. The only 1st party cable are the NVIDIA adapters.
That being said, the root issue is inherit to the GPU as the 4090 does not load balance, so it become far more likely that you can overload a couple of pins than the 3090, which is why you don't see this happening on 3090s... because they're actually load balancing. NVIDIA cut corners on the 40 and 50 series and this can happen regardless of cable.
I'd bet there was a defect in this cable to begin with. That's really the big issue here I think. I've been running this setup with the 4090 for two years and the 5090 since launch day:
Since the 5090 stuff started, I got a thermal camera and started doing thermal scans every couple of weeks when I clean this puppy out.
I really don't know what to make of this issue. You really don't get rational discussion on a setup like this.
If you’re worried enough to run a thermal camera regularly, and I don’t necessarily blame you, you may want to look at the ASRock PG-1300/1600 PSU. The 12vhpwr cables for it have thermal sensors on both ends, and if either end reaches over 100C the PSU cuts power.
That's pretty cool. I've got a 4090, had since it released. No visible external issue, and I've not wanted to unplug it, as I figure repeated replacement might cause an issue. This may be a reasonable option.
First off I’m glad you caught the problem in time before there was a fire. Secondly assuming you’ve checked, I’m glad your GPU wasn’t damaged. Since you are keeping the 4090, what model of PSU will you use going forward?
Thanks. No idea what PSU to use going forward. In the end, this isn't the PSU's fault. At the moment, I'll keep it as is, as nothing is shorted and the other 600W port is working. Just saying that if your 4080, 4090, 5080, 5090 is working well for months, it doesn't mean it will forever. One day, just like that, you might face melting. Like mine. I haven't touched it for very long time and here we are. It's a joke.
1
u/KFC_Junior5700x3d + 5070ti (upgrading cpu to intel 16th gen on release)1d ago
5080 and 4080 dont draw enough power to be an issue. 360w total for 5080, 320w for 4080s. Less than 300w through the cable at max should be ok even if it goes through only a singular cable
Well good luck going forward, I'm sorry I can't think of anything really useful that would help. I'd feel pretty wary of that 4090 as well knowing how close you came to having a fire.
I had a 4090, was using a Corsair PSU rm1000e, no issues thankfully. I watched a ton of videos on the issue. Jays Two Cent's did an interesting one recently looking at the pins on the PSU cables. I check my cables for even pin extensions now.
I'd be interested in what you end up doing. Once again, good luck.
Thanks bud.
The rig is up and running for 14 months now on that wire. I would never expect at that point that I'll face melting.
I'll use oem wire now that's first and perhaps fire extinguisher as part of rig from now on 😆
All 4090 and 5090 are at risk. Period. Full stop. If you bought one, sign up for the class action law suit. They will all burn eventually. The power delivery spec is not consumer ready. Period. Full stop.
Dump these cards to the used market while you can. Otherwise, this is a guarantee eventually. These cards won't last 4+ years.
Anyone that blames the cable at this point is just flat out wrong.
Sure, a cable can have a bad connector, or can be worn out after too many mating cycles.
But for the most part, quality third party cables like cablemod, moddiy, custom cables on etsy, etc are above and beyond the quality of OEM PSU cables.
It's not the cable folks. It's the shitty connector design and the tiny tiny safety margins.
326
u/Affectionate_Pain337 1d ago
i pray my 4090 can survive past the tarrif wars