The US repair company Northridge-Fix has one new video on the topic published around melted power connectors on Nvidia Geforce RTX 4090 graphics cards. The channel has now become known through its regular news and tutorials on YouTube, and the videos about Nvidia’s graphics cards in particular may have contributed a large part to this.
The repair company is currently repairing around 200 graphics cards with a defect in the power connection caused by overheating. Nvidia now consistently delivers current batches and the Super models with the revised 12V 6×6 connection, which remains compatible but is intended to offer better protection through shorter sensor contacts, among other things.
According to Northridge-Fix, this should also help, as there are generally no known problems with the newer cards. Instead, the Cablemod adapters that have since been recalled continue to cause numerous damage to graphics cards. Cablemod warned months ago against continuing to use the 90-degree adapters, but the information does not seem to have reached all customers.
Damage can also occur after a long period of time
Users should not be lulled into a false sense of security, because the thermal cycles when the graphics card warms up and cools down can cause the contacts to loosen over a longer period of time and ultimately lead to damage without warning and despite the cable being plugged in correctly. Anyone who uses such an adapter should send it back to Cablemod and will receive either credit in the Cablemod shop or a full refund of the purchase price.
Almost exclusively users of the Nvidia Geforce RTX 4090, both in the Founders Edition and from Nvidia’s board partners, are affected. The graphics cards have a regular power consumption of up to 450 watts; depending on the manufacturer and OC settings, up to 660 watts are possible. Cards of the Nvidia Geforce RTX 4080 Super type and below are not affected due to their significantly lower power consumption, at least there is no noticeably high error rate so far.