Gainward has been forced to delay shipments of its custom GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards because their included 12VHPWR adapter cables, which apparently have problems, need to be replaced, according to a letter from a support agent with Australian retailer TechFast, who had some disappointing news to give to purchasers this week. The letter claims that this cable replacement dilemma isn’t limited to Gainward, an indication that NVIDIA may be addressing its GeForce RTX 40 Series power connector debacle soon, potentially announcing an official recall or replacement program to alleviate fears among the enthusiast community while giving some technical insight as to what went wrong. “It affects every card in the market,” TechFast went on to say in its letter, which included an estimate of mid-November for its GeForce RTX 4090 shipments.
The letter from TechFast in full, as shared on r/NVIDIA:
I have some important information regarding your RTX 4090 order with us.
RTX 4090 cards come with included power supply adapter cables to ensure compatibility with ATX 2.0 standard power supplies. As you may have seen, issues have been reported by customers receiving the first batches of 4090 cards, where these adapters have been exhibiting symptoms of overheating/melting under certain circumstances. While investigations are still continuing and NVIDIA has not yet released a public statement, Gainward has told us that the cables shipped with their cards will be being replaced. As a result, they are holding shipping of all cards until this has taken place. We also understand this cable replacement will not be limited to Gainward alone.
We have been given an estimate of the middle of November for this to occur, putting our receiving them around 2 weeks from now at this stage. We will endeavour to keep you updated as we are given information.
We will be receiving all ordered cards at the same time, so even if you were planning on using an ATX 3.0/PCle 5.0 capable PSU unit (which is advised), we cannot escalate the shipment of your card separately.
We apologise for the delay here – this is clearly not of our doing as it affects every card in the market, but we do believe that customers of these high-end products would prefer to receive a GPU that is fit for purpose as intended.
Kind Regards,
Caleb
Sales/Support Agent
Discussion (8 replies)
Join Discussion →Good someone needs to step up and fix this crap.
Fix what exactly? There is no engineering or technical reason as to why the melting is occurring. Trying to cause melting has been unsuccessful within spec (600w) even by breaking/damaging the connector/adapter
Hopefully Gamer's Nexus can find out what's causing it with them gathering as many cables as they can
Finding an issue from what was likely the first few batches of cables when the overall failure rate appears to be less than 0.001% is just likely going to not happen
I'm all for making sure stuff doesn't catch on fire but there has to be a reason for replacement/recall not just unproven speculation
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This statement from Gainward has been retracted as no issues have been found - https://www.facebook.com/Gainward/posts/pfbid0tukTQ2iETKiELWFKJcmUnba3TeDXMBJFAkjAtGMVE5FK9uwUJUi849pLXaeKW4Krl
I've been saying this all along. I do believe there are either a few bad cables that made it through that shouldn't have to the end consumer as Igor's lab and Gamers Nexus found. Still on the fence with the human error aspect as well. Granted the cable/ connector shouldn't be as "flimsy" as it is, but that's just a bad design all around.
Since the power delivery and control on these cards is logic controlled, maybe it's a software issue. Maybe the card is inadvertently trying to pull too much power through a single wire, and the cable/plug has nothing to do with it.
I'm no hardware engineer, but just something I've been thinking about.
If they are doing a recall presumably they are changing something. And not just redistributing the same cables for fun :LOL:
As I linked at the bottom of my post the 'recall' didn't happen
That doesn't exactly instill confidence.
Insert Leslie Nielsen Police Squad meme here.
This one?