It’s another day in the seemingly endless drama surrounding damage to GeForce RTX graphics cards. Of late most of the issues have involved melting adapters from well-known cable manufacturer CableMod who recently issued a statement regarding, at the time, around 20 cases that had been reported to it. Just yesterday a new report obtained by hardware reviewer and tester Igor Wallossek verified the number had climbed to above 30 but was still far below even 0.1% of CableMod’s total sales for the adapter and it had indicated an unusual percentage involving ASUS graphics cards. Now as CableMod provides sales data regarding which adapter variants have been sold it is asking for more info from customers as to which specific graphics cards they are using them with.
As CableMod provides a new sales breakdown for all of its right-angle adapters the information paints a somewhat different picture. It explains that while around 47% of the adapters that have been sold are compatible with ASUS cards only 15% (10,800 adapters) are known to be nearly exclusive to the inverted design used by ASUS and is indicated as the 180 Degree Var A type adapter while the other 32% is the 90 Degree Var A which could include a number of other manufacturer’s graphics cards. The information CableMod provides breaks down the RMA rate for both types, including the 18 reports on Reddit from owners of ASUS cards (which are said to have used both types) to a mere 0.0016% of its total sales.
The company would still like to know from customers specifically which cards they are using the adapters with to further refine its data results and presumably narrow down potential issues and answer questions regarding them.
Statement From CableMod (via Reddit):
“Recently, we have received questions whether or not certain brands are more prone to melting failures with our angled adapters compared to others. Some comments on our subreddit have been suggesting that ASUS cards seem to be disproportionately affected by melting issues with our adapter. However, we want to point out that this is a bit misleading, as it doesn’t take into account the installed base of GPUs.
Of all adapter variants, around 47% of them are compatible with the ASUS card’s inverted 12VHPWR power port, represented by 90 Degree Variant A, and 180 Degree Variant A. The remaining variants use the regular clip side down orientation, and thus are split up between all other GPU brands.
All variants cover many different GPU brands except for one – the 180 degree Variant A. This adapter is almost exclusively used for ASUS cards, given the orientation of the 12VHPWR port on the GPU. Let’s use this as our base for analysis.
Around 15% of adapters are 180 degree Variant A. This means that we’ve sold around 10,800 of this variant. If we take the 18 ASUS cases tallied on Reddit, which includes both 90 degree and 180 degree variants, we get an RMA rate of 0.0016% – an extremely low figure.
It’s important to realize that the number of cases appearing on Reddit is an absolute number, but don’t take into account how many of each GPU brand is used in the wild. Given that most of the GPUs being paired with our adapter are ASUS, it’s easy to see why more cases are being reported with ASUS GPUs.
Another point we’d like to mention is that we also don’t know which GPUs in particular are being used by our customers. Are they using 4090s? 4080s? Which brands of each? We think this is probably important context as well.
Going forward, we will be surveying our customers to get a more detailed analysis of which how our adapters are being used, and with which GPU. We think this will help answer a lot of questions the community has been asking. However, as we have an extremely low RMA rate compared to the numbers of adapters sold, and our dedicated after-sales support for such cases, we do not feel there is any added cause for concern regarding the use of our adapters.
Thanks for reading!
Sincerely,
Your Friends at CableMod”