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Nvidia’s RTX 4090 Founders Edition has become Lovelace’s latest flagship model to fall victim to a melted adapter cable, at least as reported by a user on Reddit.
Previously, we’d only seen reports of this happening with third-party RTX 4090 graphics cards, i.e. those made by Nvidia’s partners, as opposed to the Founders Edition made by Nvidia itself, which had no documented incident of cable melt before.
Unfortunately, that is no longer true, according to the report Reddit (opens in new tab) which Tom’s hardware (opens in new tab) spotted. The RTX 4090 buyer used the graphics card in a case with the side panel removed for extra breathing room, and made sure the connection between PSU and GPU was solid and well placed, noting that: “I made sure it was in place clicked and I also made sure the 3 cables didn’t pull the adapter down.”
The voltage on the adapter is believed to be one of the possible causes of the melting RTX 4090 cable problem, so apparently it was not a factor in this case.
The Redditor commented: “I played mostly Warzone for the next 7 days, on/off maybe about 2-3 hours at a time. 10/29/22, My screen went blank after about an hour of playing. Tried restarting the PC several times and still couldn’t get a picture. I checked the GPU and the adapter and that’s when I saw it.
“I immediately contacted Nvidia, sent my card and adapter to them and within 3 days I received a replacement 4090. I will not be using the new card until Nvidia makes a statement regarding this issue.”
Analysis: 26 and counting…
We’re still awaiting that statement, of course, and the results of Nvidia’s investigation into exactly what’s going on here. Meanwhile, it’s concerning to see that one of Nvidia’s own cards has apparently fallen victim to this controversy, when it wasn’t before.
In total, there are now 26 reports on Reddit of these cable-melting RTX 4090 incidents, which is starting to become an uncomfortably high number. It certainly looks like it’s time for Nvidia to get its skates on and get to the bottom of what the gremlin in the making is once and for all.
You may have noticed that the RTX 4090 user above actually only connected 3 x 8-pin PCIe power cables, instead of the usual 4. They did this as a precaution, noting that this is enough to power up the graphics card. start, but limit the power consumption to a theoretically lower maximum (450 W) than if four cables were connected. also the melting problem).