RTX 4090 owner says his 16-pin power connector melted at the GPU and PSU ends simultaneously

WTF?! Confirming that the melting 16-pin power connector problem hasn’t gone away, another RTX 4090 user says that not only has his connector melted on the GPU side, it simultaneously turned to molten plastic on the PSU end. And this was while the card’s power was limited to 75%.

The melting 16-pin power connector (12VHPWR) issue has been haunting RTX 4090 owners since Nvidia’s flagship launched back in October 2022. It’s a big problem that hasn’t gone away; in April, a repair shop revealed that it was receiving 200 melted RTX 4090s per month, an increase over the 100 per month it was receiving in the fall.

A couple of elements make the latest case stand out. As reported by Tom’s Hardware, the RTX 4090 owner in question wrote on the Korean Quasar Zone forums that the connector melted at the end connecting to his card, which appears to be an MSI GeForce RTX 4090 Suprim X 24G. Nothing unusual there, but what was strange is that the connector at the end connecting to the power supply, an FSP Hydro, melted at the same time.

We have seen plenty of cases where the connector melts at the graphics card end, but melting where it plugs into the power supply is rarer; the first known case of it happening with an ATX 3.0 PSU was reported back in January last year. This is certainly the first reported case of connectors melting at both ends simultaneously.

What’s even more surprising is that the user had set the RTX 4090 to run at just 75% of its power limit. Many owners reduce the performance in the hope of avoiding situations like these, but it appears that this doesn’t always work.

Nvidia initially blamed the melting on users not fully plugging in the connectors properly, though pretty much everyone else has pointed to design flaws. The new, supposedly safer 12V-2×6 connectors arrived last summer.

Back in February, the voluntary recall of CableMod’s 12VHPWR angled adapters, which were coming loose, overheating, and melting into the GPU, became a mandatory one. Ironically, the adapters were supposed to mitigate the risk of the connectors melting as they stop the cables from pressing against the side of a case when plugged into bulky cards.