Nvidia RTX 5090 graphics card power cable melts at both ends, bulge spotted at PSU side
Nvidia RTX 5090 graphics card power cable melts at both ends, bulge spotted at PSU side
18 Comments
Oh wow who would have seen that coming?
Oh look, it has been 0 days since the last 12v HPWR connector melting incident. Again
Is that a Pregnant psu cable ?
Have there been any failures with 12V HPWR cable that is 12+4 pins on both ends or have these failures only happened with 12+4 on the GPU side and 2x 8 pins on the PSU side?
What kills me is the standards…. Look, I understood when we kept adding more PCIE-6 and PCIE-8 connectors because all power supplies already had these connectors, but with the 12VHPWR breaking all backwards compatibility they had a chance to introduce a real lower gauge connector type that could easily handle 600W and instead they purposely shit the proverbial bed. Other industries and even hobbies have overcome the power connector issue in a myriad of ways that could have been leveraged, but instead, here we are.
Heat travels very well through copper wire. In machinery, you see the same problem with loose connections or corrosion build up over time. It’s a common problem.
It’s quite insane to me how many amps they run through connections like that. Anything above 20A is not really very reliable through normal slip on connectors like pins or QDCs. You start to avoid them at this amp load specifically because they start failing like this.
You also need to do other things like derating wiring and connectors for bundling and for elevated ambient temps. Well, a 12 wire package through conduit is derated 50%. You might have to derate another 20% if that wire is anywhere locally hot.
Well now we’re talking 12AWG wire as the minimum safe wire.
Oh, but what if we use high temp wire!
You can’t. The connectors and attached electrical components are also temp rated. NEC code generally pics 75C as the target for parts unless the part is specifically rated, and then that may supersede it (depending).
The basic gist is the setup basically requires 12AWG wire and connectors sized at that level too.
What wire are they using? 16AWG. Cool. You’re immediately two gauges too small.
And I’m not saying this because some have reported 20A through some of the wires. No. I’m just taking the 600W limit and the piddly 8.33A ideally expected. I’m just derating for the bundle of wires which insulate each other (not actually in a raceway/conduit, but I like to treat bundled sets like they are). And I’m derating a little bit for temp (although I could go farther with this too). That’s it. I’m derating for the expected conditions, and that alone, with only 8.33A I would expect to use 12AWG wire and connectors that can handle over 20A.
Now if you ARE seeing individual wires pulling 20A too, well, then you better be running 8AWG wire. See how fast this spirals out of control? You’re designing for peak current and derating for worst case situations. And now you have a power supply, still a 12 wire setup, that needs to be 8AWG!
What are the chances of this happening with a 5070? I’m debating getting one at MSRP but am seriously concerned about the melting connectors!
And yet everyone keeps enabling Nvidia by buying their products….
Just put xt60/90 on it at this point
oWo
This has inspired me to go pay $3K from a scalper for my own 5090. It’ll be fine.
What do we think will be the standard going forward? GPUs keep drawing huge amounts of power and if you took something like AMD’s most recent offering and scaled it up to provide similar to performance to something like a 5090 it would be drawing even more power. Like eventually, if we want to keep making high-end GPU that draw a lot of power, we need to rethink the way we handle this stuff. I’m not really that into the world of power supplies and cables, is there already a standard that is likely to be switched over to somewhat soon?
I’ve seen photoshopped pics of 5080/90 cards with seperate AC power out plugs coming out the back end.
No joke.
They need to start doing that or add a power supply brick type setup instead.
You can’t keep on selling a product that is an expensive potential fire hazard lime that long term.
I love my Evga 3080 so much
With all these issues it still amazes me all the people buying these melting graphics cards.
What have we learned everyone???
12v HPWR connectors suck balls. PCI E is the way.
Its less than 1 % dudes.
My 5090 and 3x 4090 haven’t had a single problem. Use good cables people.