CableMod has been having to deal with its share of brush fires following reports of its 12VHPWR adapters melting and has issued a statement regarding it. The premium custom cable and adapter company is standing behind its products and is offering to reimburse customers whose GPUs were damaged and then denied RMA request by the graphics card manufacturer. CableMod has said in its statement that it found in its investigations into the melted adapters the majority were due to them not being fully inserted but some were actually caused by manufacturing defects.
CableMod adds that it has sold tens of thousands of the adapters and it has had roughly twenty cases reported. It has also said that it is planning giveaways for cards that it has repaired and has already given away one on an NVIDIA subreddit page. Lastly, CableMod is covering shipping costs for cards that it has asked owners to send to repair shops, even if it has already been determined that improper insertion was the root cause.
From CableMod (per its Subreddit page):
“Hello Hardware Community,
Our 12VHPWR Angled Adapters have undoubtedly been our fasting-selling item at launch, and we have to start by thanking everyone who supported us and decided to pick one of them up.
Over the past couple of weeks, a number of people have been making posts regarding melted adapters, and this has caused a number of people to write to us here on Reddit and other platforms asking if this is happening a lot. We wanted to make this post to explain what we are seeing on our end, and what we are doing to handle these cases.
From the beginning, we set out to create a product that not only looked good aesthetically but was both robust and reliable. We have sold tens of thousands of these adapters since launch back in March, and of these, have received around 20 cases where the adapter connector had melted – an extremely low failure rate.
Upon analysis, the majority of failures were due to the adapters not being fully inserted into the GPU, while other cases were indeed due to defective adapters. We cannot deny that things can go wrong during the manufacturing process – no company can guarantee a 0% failure rate. However, what we can do is help our users when such things occur.
To that end, we have been closely monitoring cases that are being reported to our support team. For GPUs where the RMA requests are denied, we have offered to reimburse the full purchase price to the affected users. Some users have been asked to send their GPUs to repair centers, and we have covered all shipping costs as well. We have been doing this even in cases where the adapter was not fully inserted, as we want to make sure that none of our users are left out in the cold.
As for GPUs that are repaired, we are planning a series of giveaways to help benefit our community. We have given one away on the NVIDIA subreddit and will be giving away more across our various social platforms.
CableMod stands 100% behind each and every product that we ship, and when cases like this occur, we will always be here to help. As always, we thank everyone for their support and faith in us.
Sincerely,
Your Friends at CableMod“
External Testing
Reports of the melting adapters have been gathering for some time but the issue was put into the spotlight about a month ago when a repair shop said it had received a number of graphics cards that had been damaged from using them. Seemingly unbeknownst to the repair shop the majority of cards had actually been sent in by CableMod themselves for repair and external investigation into the damage. This detail was uncovered by Gamers Nexus after it too learned of the matter and delved further into what was happening.