Graphics card manufacturer Nvidia now faces legal action over the allegedly defective power connector for its RTX 4090 GPUs. This comes after multiple users have had their 16-pin connectors melt after plugging into Nvidia’s high-end graphics card.
Nvidia released the RTX 4090 on October 12 as the company’s newest flagship graphics card. With an MSRP of $1,599 US, it is one of the priciest GPUs on the market and is significantly more expensive than its predecessor. That price tag brings users 24GB of VRAM, a base clock of 2.235Ghz, 16,384 CUDA cores, 128 ray tracing cores, and a 384-bit bus width. However, all of that depends on its connectors functioning correctly and not melting when users plug them in.
The plaintiff filed a lawsuit against the company last week over its allegedly defective 16-pin connectors. According to the legal complaint, there is a defect in Nvidia’s 12VHPWR 16-pin connector, which caused it to begin melting shortly after the plaintiff plugged it into his newly purchased Nvidia RTX 4090. Specifically, the legal filing attributes the malfunction to a design flaw related to the amount of power flowing through each of the connector’s pins.
It appears that a loss of connection in any one pin leads to a significant spike in the amount of electricity flowing through the remaining 15. Even if the disconnection is only temporary, this immediate increase in wattage results in severe overheating and a subsequent meltdown. Not only does this destroy the connector on the power cable, but it can also potentially damage the user’s graphics card. Overheating cables can also represent a fire hazard, though there have not been any reports of fires caused by this malfunction.
The plaintiff was not the only person to experience melting cables with Nvidia’s RTX 4090 GPU. While this kind of malfunction can result from user-inflicted damage to the connector, the meltdowns seem to occur regardless of how careful the user is. So far, at least 19 people have reported similar meltdowns. Nvidia is still investigating these reports but has yet to release an official statement regarding the cause of the malfunction.
Still, the plaintiff's legal team appears to be confident that the problem stems from the design flaw described in the legal filing. His lawsuit demands Nvidia pay damages to all customers who have experienced similar issues with the GPU’s 16-pin connector. Regardless of the outcome of this case, it is fair to say that the 4090’s launch has not gone as well as Nvidia might have hoped. This isn’t even the only Nvidia GPU that has a severe overheating issue, with the RTX 4090 Ti reportedly canceled due to melting its own power supply.
Source: IGN, Tom’s Hardware