Nvidia's RTX 5090 power connectors are melting
28 comments
·February 11, 2025BigJono
This shit is so fucking dumb. Sorry for the unhinged rant, but it's ridiculous how bad every single connector involved with building a PC is in 2025.
I'm just a software guy, so maybe some hardware engineer can chime in (and I'd love to find out exactly what I'm missing and why it might be harder than it seems), but why on earth can everything not just be easily accessible and click nicely into place?
I'm paying multiple hundred dollars for most of these parts, and multiple thousands for some now that GPUs just get more and more expensive by the year, and the connector quality just gets worse and worse. How much more per unit can proper connectors possibly cost?
I still have to sit there stressing out because I have no idea if the PSU<->Mobo power connector is seated properly, I have no idea if the GPU 12VHPWR cable is seated properly, I'm tearing skin off my fingers trying to get the PSU side of the power cables in because they're all seated so closely together, have a microscopic amount of plastic to grip onto making it impossible to get any leverage, and need so much force to seat properly, again with no fucking click. I have no idea if any of the front panel pins are seated properly, I can't even reach half of them even in a full ATX case, fuck me if I want anything smaller, and no matter what order you assemble everything in, something is going to block off access to something else.
I'm sure if you work in a PC shop and deal with this 15 times a day you'll have strategies for dealing with it all, but most of us build a PC once every 3 years if that. It feels like as an average user you have zero chance to build any intuition about how any of it works, and it's infuriating that the hardware engineers seem to put in fuck all effort to help their customers assemble their expensive parts without breaking them, or in this case, having them catch fire because something is off by a millimetre.
This space feels ripe for a radical re-design.
delichon
There exists a perfectly balanced point between usability and affordability that, if it can be achieved, makes exactly nobody happy.
Dylan16807
What's wrong with the 4/6/8 pin plugs? I find them perfectly good. And they have a high power variant that would have worked much better here, rated for twice the current per pin.
BigJono
They're the best of the bunch when it comes to PC parts, but think how far off they are in terms of usability compared to USB, or Ethernet, or HDMI, or Displayport, or those old VGA cables you had to screw in, or literally anything else. They only look good in comparison to the other power connectors.
hulitu
> how far off they are in terms of usability compared to USB, or Ethernet, or HDMI, or Displayport, or those old VGA cables
Those connectors were not designed to carry power.
stefan_
My favorite is these shitty RGB connectors. They were obviously very recently decided on, yet somehow what we got is something without any positive retention or determined orientation yet still obnoxiously big.
gnabgib
Discussion (22 points, 1 day ago, 10 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42996057
lyu07282
It's strange how Nvidia just doubled down on a flawed design for no apparent reason. It doesn't even do anything, the adapter is so short you still have the same mess of cables in the front of the case as before.
onli
I was under the impression it saves them money. Is that correct?
It is also a powerplay. By potentially introducing a PSU connector AMD and Intel do not use they abuse their market power to limit interoperability.
Plus probably some internal arrogance about not admitting failures.
bayindirh
> Plus probably some internal arrogance about not admitting failures.
Arrogance is good. Accelerates the "forced correction" (aka cluebat) process. NVIDIA needs that badly.
fredoralive
The connector is a PCI spec, it's not an Nvidia thing, it's just they introduced devices using it first.
onli
I don't think thats correct. Nvidia used that connector first and then a similar PCI spec came out. Compatibility is limited. See https://www.hwcooling.net/en/nvidia-12pin-and-pcie-5-0-gpu-p... from back then.
rcarmo
It saves them money on a four-digit MSRP. I think they could afford to be less thrifty.
formerly_proven
I doubt engineering a new connector (I think it's new? Unlike the Mini-Fit Jr which has been around for like 40-50 years) and standing up a supply chain for it could offset the potentially slightly lower BOM cost of using one specialty connector instead of three MiniFit Jr 8-pins. However, three of those would not have been enough for the 4090, nevermind the 5090.
formerly_proven
This connector somehow has it's own Wikipedia page and most of it is about how bad it is. Look at the table at the end: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16-pin_12VHPWR_connector#Relia...
The typical way to use these is also inherently flawed. On the nVidia FE cards, they use a vertical connector which has a bus bar connecting all pins directly in the connector. Meanwhile, the adapter has a similar bus bar where all the incoming 12V wires are soldered on to. This means you have six pins per potential connecting two bus bars. Guess how this ensures relatively even current distribution? It doesn't, at all. It relies completely on just the contact resistance between pins to match.
Contrast this with the old 8-pin design, where each pin would have it's own 2-3 ft wire to the PSU, which adds resistance in series which each pin. That in turn reduces the influence of contact resistance on current distribution. And all cards had separate shunts for metering and actively balancing current across the multiple 8-pin connectors used.
The 12VHPWR cards don't do this and the FE cards can't do this for design reasons. They all have a single 12 V plane. Only one ultra-expensive custom ASUS layout is known to have per-pin current metering and shunts (but it still has a single 12 V plane, so it can't actively balance current), and it's not known whether it is even set up to shut down when it detects a gross imbalance indicating connector failure.
wruza
Why can’t they just use a cable+socket similar to PSU - wall socket? It’s not even multiple-kilowatts range.
ch_123
I'm aware of at least one card which did this, which was a custom OEM design (specifically from Asus) which put two Geforce 7000-series GPUs on a single card: https://pcper.com/2005/10/asus-n7800gt-dual-review-7800-sli-...
Thankfully, I've never seen something like it since then.
voxadam
3dfx did it even earlier with the Voodoo 5 6000 all the way back in 2000.[1][2]
[1] https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/325466-i-wrote-the-first-...
[2] https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/voodoo5-6000.c3536
hgomersall
It's 12V, which means the currents are very high (like >40A). It feels like perhaps they need higher voltage power supplies.
vvv5
I think the problem with this is that chips can only use a relatively low voltage around 1-1.5 volts. So if you supply 48 volts to the card it still has to be stepped down and this means more components and heat dissipation on the card. We are basically arriving at the idea of graphic cards having their own integrated PSUs, but this doesn't fit well with the current physical design of computers.
vvv5
That connector (C13) is rated for 15 amps. That's 180W at 12V.
wruza
So heat depends on current, not on power. My research: https://www.reddit.com/r/ElectricalEngineering/comments/15xf...
hgomersall
No it depends on power, but the power dissipated by the cable, not the power through the cable. The power dissipated is i^2 * r, where r is the resistance of the cable and i, crucially, is the current through the cable which depends on the power it's supplying (which with a resistive load, in this case, is i * 12v).
cwillu
And the card requires up to 600 watts, which is 50 amps if the supply is 12 volts.
colechristensen
If we’re going to keep up these kilowatt scale cards, we’re just going to need higher voltage rails on PSUs. I had a bunch of similar dumb power connector problems when my 4090 was new.
Dylan16807
Is it effective to step down from 24/48 volts to the 1-2 range? Or would cards need two stages of voltage conversion?
This same thing happening on the 40 series cards was good enough vindication for me not 'upgrading' to that at the time. I'd rather not burn my house down with my beloved inside.
Can't believe the same is happening again.