Hopefully no one who buys the first card in the future has to worry about melting.
Last November, the entire tech press was all about the Nvidia RTX 4090. The pinnacle of Ada Lovelace’s architecture is truly an engineering masterpiece. At least in terms of its performance, the card had one weak point: the new 16-pin power connector.
the The indicated 12VHPWR interface had to withstand a huge load, and if users in the machine’s cramped enclosure drove the cable a little too hard or didn’t insert the plug exactly to the millimeter, it easily resulted in melting of the connector and damage to the card.
The PCI-SIG consortium, which is developing and standardizing the specification, reported a few weeks ago that an improved version of the connector had been born, and Nvidia seems to have already started using it, although it hasn’t officially communicated anywhere that they’ve redesigned the cards. However, one Reddit user reports that the RTX 4090 Founders Edition card he just bought actually came with the new connector covered.
In this version, the sensors have been moved 17mm inward. This is expected to reduce the load on the connector, the pins will not touch, overheating and melting will be completely avoided. The same solution is also being used for the recently produced RTX 4070 and RTX 4070 Ti models, and partner manufacturers are also beginning to prepare. While we’ve yet to see a card equipped with such a connector from any company, MSI has already shown off a power supply at Computex that’s made for this solution.
