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Nvidia’s hot adapter for the GeForce RTX 4090 with a built-in breaking point

293 points by elorant 4y ago

whatever1123 4y ago
- malfist 4y ago
  Nice of you to blame everyone. What's your proposal to fix it?
  - whatever1123 4y ago
    - malfist 4y ago
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- colechristensen 4y ago
  It's not individual contributors responsible for bad quality. It is corporate, investing, and all around culture that does not value quality and barely has a sense of it at all (Steve Jobs was an asshole, but he had a strong sense of quality, it doesn't matter if you agree with his choices, that's taste, it's hard to argue that things he drove apple to produce had quality) People instead value deadlines, ever advancing middle manager careers, and tiny differences in margin percentages.
  - outworlder 4y ago
    > It's not individual contributors responsible for bad quality. > It is corporate When dealing with corporations, that's _always_ the case. Even if it turns out that a single person was able to make a large mistake that went unnoticed, guess what, it's still a corporate failure. > People instead value deadlines, ever advancing middle manager careers, and tiny differences in margin percentages. Of these, the managers trying to advance are the most harmful. I've seen situations where actions of managers trying to advance their careers actually caused harm to the company, but they were able to place the blame elsewhere. Some are pretty good at that.
  - whatever1123 4y ago
    > People instead value deadlines This is definitely true, and is a cultural thing, and deadlines are like, one of the most quintessentially big corpo dysfunctions ever. > It's not individual contributors When you have a surgical complication, do you blame the admins and the hospital bureaucracy? No. When you lose a court case, who's fault is it? Do you blame the clerks? Do you blame the Attorney General? No. > does not value quality and barely has a sense of it at all I haven't met an "individual contributor" who cares about that shit in my life. Among the ones who do a lot of work all day, the rare few, the guys with the greasy hair and the track pants who live alone in Sunnyvale for a year, they have consistently been the least interested in a holistic sense of quality. You will say, oh the managers gave them the goals. Dude the managers do fucking nothing. They say the same shit to everyone, the "IC" has all the agency. They can work, or not work as much as they want. In fact the hardest working ICs I know are relentlessly optimizing for meeting immediate, dull goals. The ICs are almost always working on consumer products that are tremendously shitty and buggy. Listen, who the fuck is responsible? Everyone! Why do you give the trackpants guys a pass? They're dicks!
  - btown 4y ago
    The conundrum is: how do you build an organization that can simultaneously scale super-linearly and retain a commitment to quality? There are plenty of businesses that pursue stable profitability or linear growth and maintain quality. But the faster an organization grows, the more it becomes metrics-driven, and outside of a regulated industry where quality is a requirement, it's hard to balance the priorities. I'm reminded of Honeycomb's pointed experiment in setting up a rotating employee seat as a voting member of their board: https://www.protocol.com/workplace/board-of-directors-honeycomb-engineer https://www.protocol.com/workplace/board-of-directors-honeyc... - this type of thing can contribute towards striking the right balance at all levels of an organization. But it's definitely not a solved problem.
    - colechristensen 4y ago
      Apple did by having a quality dictator at the top. It would have lasted a lot longer but his unusual disposition led him to accidentally kill himself with a strange diet. In other words you can’t have a company run by the MBA mindset, there must be a superseding set of values beyond business school values.
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- radicaldreamer 4y ago
  Seems like you have a chip on your shoulder that has nothing to do with the topic at hand.
  - wruza 4y ago
    The sentiment is agreeable though. You see smart people everywhere, but then turn to their products and these have obvious flaws. Not hidden ones, not triggered in particular situation. Ones you can’t ignore, which greet you and tell they are your new neighbors happy to meet you everyday. MDN recently screwed up their search input. It stays collapsed until you click on it (some brightest mind decided it’d be so cool?), and also there is no I-cursor until you start typing. So confusing. CDNJS recently “updated” their site so you see a search prompt, (maybe) click on it, start typing aaand it loses all letters you’ve typed before 3-4 seconds passed since the page load. Who allowed to push that into production? That there is some guy responsible for this may drive nuts. I could go on but am depressed enough atm.
- Ygg2 4y ago
  > Why are third party amateurs solving this? They have a vested interest. The real issue is Moore's law is on its last legs and you can't squeeze blood from stone. So manufacturer resorted to increasing TDP and bringing us closer to voltage that are more likely to cause issues. As for general shittiness. That's been going since - forever. Not sure why you're complaining. It's both incorrect and offtopic. Race to the bottom is as old as human civilization.
- tester756 4y ago
  You just realized that the world runs on mediocrity? PS: think of it when visiting doc, mechanic, etc :)
  - whatever1123 4y ago
    I don't know dude. Ironically if you are poor in a place like Boston, you can go to Man's Greatest Hospital. Programmers were definitely elite at one point. The gulf between them and the medicine kids has grown a lot.
    - snovv_crash 4y ago
      I guess you haven't used the medical system recently - despite monumental efforts by doctors, the standard of care is actually horrific when you take the whole system into account. It has turned into a system of keeping patients alive rather than delivering optimal outcomes, and much like the legal system, if you have someone knowledgeable who can put in considerable time on your case your outcomes will be a lot better.
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- LeifCarrotson 4y ago
  If a single PM can screw up this badly, that's a complete failure of the NVIDIA bureaucracy. The answer to the "5 whys" should never be that one individual made a bad decision, when the bad decision has consequences of this magnitude. It's a systems issue.
  - deleted 4y ago
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- nomel 4y ago
  And this is why hardware is hard; it requires good engineering culture. Unfortunately, being meticulous is directly opposed to profit. You have look at the likes of Apple to find good hardware culture, where "image" has a higher priority, allowing that engineering culture to flex a bit more than usual.
  - cogman10 4y ago
    The thing that sucks is a culture turning bad does not immediately result in loss of sales or revenue. Once you get big enough, your culture can decline for years or even decades. Yet in the first, second, or even third year of terrible culture changes, a business will likely be patting themselves on the backs for how fast they got stuff out the door and how much money they saved by reducing head count.
- deleted 4y ago
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badkitty99 4y ago
TheRealPomax 4y ago
I'm not sure people have been yelling that the spec or form factor are the problem, they've been yelling that NVIDIA is the problem, exactly for how they implemented and supply a 12V solution (which includes both the physical products they supply, and the messaging they've put out around it) which this article yet again underlines as being both real, and even worse than initially thought. No need to beat about the bush, the "certain celebrities" is folks like JayzTwoCents who are willing to destroy their relationship with NVIDIA over this by showing that a company intentionally sells products they know are fire hazards, lied about that to the public, doubled down on the lies when they got called out on it the more people staretd reporting on it, and kept doing so all the way up to when official paperwork showed they knew about the issue and went ahead with it all along. The initial reports were "this is dangerous", but escalated to "NVIDIA knew this would could catch fire and pushed for sales anyway, this cannot be okay". If this was a cable that just bricked cards, or even entire computers, that's a dick move but it's just a computer. No one died, just some hardware got destroyed. However, that's not what it does: it can literally start fires and people can die, and there is publicly available documentation that shows that NVIDIA is strictly liable (in the legal sense) for gross negligence (again in the legal sense). NVIDIA should be all kinds of sued and federally fined here.
- aftbit 4y ago
  I was with you until: "and fined for half their annual profits by the FCC". Not only is that not the FCC's job, but that's an insane fine for a relatively small problem. If anything, NVIDIA should be required to recall the adapters and replace them with working ones at their cost, and maybe pre-fund a settlement fund to pay out in cases of damage due to this connector.
  - TheRealPomax 4y ago
    Fair enough, changed it to just federally fined. But maybe going "we know this can cause fires, we're going to sell it anyway" should come with an insane fine. If you're willing to burn down the place for sales, see if you can recover from the same being done to you. And if you can't, maybe that should be the price for prioritising sales over human lives.
fazfq 4y ago
Maybe I am running low on coffee because I felt like I was having a stroke while reading this post. >However, the “safe” is only valid if e.g. the used supply lines from the power supply with “native” 12VHPWR connector have a good quality and 16AWG lines or at least the used 12VHPWR to 4x 6+2 pin adapter also offers what it promises. Like what is this? I know those words, but that sentence makes no sense.
- ideamotor 4y ago
  Actually, that is NOT (as such), “how I feel” when I read articles like this - NOT written by professionals (But who is one anyways) - Confucius says, which I tend to agree, which if you, like me, concur.
- cmsj 4y ago
  Igor is awesome, but his English has to be read with a generous spirit ;)
  - ideamotor 4y ago
    I didn’t realize the author was non-native so now I feel bad, thank you.
- NotYourLawyer 4y ago
  His English is way more comprehensible than my German.
  - programmer_dude 4y ago
    Do you also write incomprehensible articles in German? :)
- treeman79 4y ago
  That’s exactly what it feels like to have a mild stroke. I know these words individually.
- dheera 4y ago
rob-olmos 4y ago
Was there a good reason why they switched from 3x8pin to 1x12pin for so much wattage?
- cmsj 4y ago
  They started this in the last generation where the founders cards had a different-but-similar connector. In this generation, they would actually need 4x8pin to reach the 600W maximum these cards are supposed to be able to draw in a fully overclocked state, so really this just comes down to PCB space, but with the draw getting this high, the cable also has some signalling wires so the card knows how many Watts it should limit itself to.
  - rob-olmos 4y ago
    Ah interesting, thanks. Looking more into it, 4x8pin would be 12x12v wires/pins, and the 12VHPWR only has 6x12v for the same max wattage.
  - bcrosby95 4y ago
    As someone ignorant to this space, considering the PCB is already shorter than the heatsink, I assume the problem is more of re-arranging other components on the PCB than the actual physical space the final product takes up.
- Latty 4y ago
  I mean, firstly just that consumers hate having to plug in a ton of cables: it's bad for aesthetics, it's annoying to manage the cables, etc... The bigger reason is probably to save board space as nvidia have been shrinking the form factor of the actual boards so they can dedicate more room to flow-through cooling. Connectors take up a lot of board edge. The new spec does also have data pins so the devices can negotiate for power which could in theory reduce issues and inform the consumer better about limits with future PSUs and devices. So there are advantages to the new spec, both specifically with the form factor and more generally.
cmsj 4y ago
Buildzoid on YouTube has a very good response to this - he does not agree that the fault is the (still terrible) wires at the back of the connector. His reasoning is that the melting is happening down at the pin end of the connector, not at the back, and the pins that are melting the most are the edge ones, not the middle ones. There's about 10 minutes of critique of the various ways other people have been evaluating it, which is interesting for sure, but the meat starts here: https://youtu.be/yvSetyi9vj8?t=744 https://youtu.be/yvSetyi9vj8?t=744
- deng 4y ago
  I agree, that does not make sense. There must be a problem with the connection to the pins, and I'd really like to see a close-up of the female connector on the problematic card, because if stuff gets bend there out of shape even slightly, you can quickly get high resistance. EDIT: Watched the video further, and actually the cable has the female side and they're using 2-split connectors. Yeah, that's asking for trouble when you push 50 amps through those... Sheesh, such shoddy stuff for a 1600$ card, just incredible.
- washadjeffmad 4y ago
  The failure doesn't necessarily have to happen at the junctions for the junctions to be a cause. It also makes sense that the edge pins would heat up more because they're both surrounded by less mass and a likelier conduit to distribute current and heat based on the resistivity of the shown wiring. Reminds me of the molded MOLEX to SATA adapters for HDDs that suffer from similarly shoddy wiring design and are prone to melting/fires. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAyy_WOSdVc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAyy_WOSdVc
  - deng 4y ago
    > The failure doesn't necessarily have to happen at the junctions for the junctions to be a cause. Indeed, it can also happen that because some connection is failing, too much current flows through the remaining ones, but this is clearly not what is happening here (because it's not the inner connectors that are melting, and also because Igor tried and couldn't replicate this). This really looks like heat from high resistance, and the outer connectors are simply those experiencing the most mechanical stress, and it's really easy for these 2-slit-connectors to get bend out of shape.
mensetmanusman 4y ago
Training cat detection melts cables.
MBCook 4y ago
Perhaps this wouldn’t be a problem if the cards didn’t need 1700W (estimated). Maybe this is not just a bad design, but physics trying to warn us this path isn’t smart.
- TwoNineA 4y ago
  > Perhaps this wouldn’t be a problem if the cards didn’t need 1700W (estimated). [citation needed]
  - MBCook 4y ago
    That was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, thus the “(estimated)” part. Hooray for the clarity of sarcasm in text. Sigh. I know it’s not that bad. A standard wall circuit can’t supply that much power. But I find the power levels graphics cards have gotten to crazy and think that’s what we should be solving, not how to supply them more power without things melting.
- cmsj 4y ago
  That's an interesting estimate ;) The 12VHPWR connector is actually rated for up to 600W.
- rjh29 4y ago
  4090's TDP is 450W, and it demonstrably runs on 850W PSUs. If the cables are rated high enough and the PSU is large enough, there is no wattage that is "less valid" than any other. The 3090 TI from the previous generation runs at 450W too, it just uses 3x6+2 cables rather than nvidia's fancy adapter.
- bcrosby95 4y ago
  It's ok, I'm sure your comment won't be sarcasm in a generation or two. I'm looking forward to the day my PC uses more electricity than my air conditioning. With the power of GeForce I might see that day.
zepmck 4y ago
People pretending to do professional work with low budget/quality workstation. If you cannot afford to operate a 4090 according to specs, you cannot blame NVIDIA if things go wrong.
- Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
  What spec do you think users are violating?
- mceachen 4y ago
  My understanding is that the failure is the included power adapter. If I spend both of $1600USD on a product, I assume the included adapter will work.
- gambiting 4y ago
  Eh? What are you talking about? The part melting and damaging the card is the adapter that's literally provided by Nvidia. How is this "not according to spec"????
dvdkon 4y ago
Here I am, crimping wires for a 3D printer that will draw at most a quarter of the current, and NVIDIA is just giving out connectors with shoddily soldered connections? Shame! It also looks like they think strain relief is optional. EDIT: This is a crimped wire for ATX power connectors: https://modmymods.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/a86a6471cd126c7d06b2a398b3c8a4ae/3/0/30cm-mf-orange-1.jpg https://modmymods.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/a8... Notice that the insulation is also crimped, making sure that the actual electrical connection doesn't flex.
- NotYourLawyer 4y ago
  Soldering is perfectly fine, if you do it correctly.
  - programmer_dude 4y ago
    It's not fine if it's going to melt.
    - Nextgrid 4y ago
      It will only melt if it’s either undersized or a bad joint to begin with. A properly-sized, well-made solder joint will have no reason to melt unless heated externally by something else failing.
  - jmole 4y ago
    soldering is a terrible idea for cables that need to flex, which is why you’ll typically only find them used in applications with major strain relief, or inside non-user-serviceable enclosures (e.g. inside an ATX PSU)
    - snovv_crash 4y ago
      You need strain relief either way, soldering or crimping. A well soldered joint will have lower resistance than a crimped one and be more resistant to vibrations.
Mountain_Skies 4y ago
Coming soon to the EU: graphics cards powered by three USB-C connectors.
- empiricus 4y ago
  Actually graphics cards will be interdicted because they consume too much electric power. Just like high-end TVs next year.
- CamperBob2 4y ago
  That's not the dumbest idea in the world. The USB people had the sense to use a higher voltage to keep the I^2*R losses down. USB PD 3.1 can handle 240 watts over an appropriately-rated Type C cable, so 3 such cables could handle the load with some margin to spare. PC power supplies could do worse than to move in that direction.
bri3d 4y ago
I'm curious as to why no vendor has yet tried to push a 24V or 48V PSU rail standard to reduce the amperage pushed over these crappy pins. Of course then the board itself needs to be able to handle the higher voltage for down-conversion, but don't these systems usually use switching / Buck regulators as the first stage anyway, which could easily be tuned to handle the higher input voltage with minimal loss added?
- LarsAlereon 4y ago
  The Power Stamp Alliance was working on 48v modular VRMs for HPC and servers, but I haven't seen any news in the past couple of years.
- allenrb 4y ago
  Yes, exactly. Even before this issue, ATX 3.0 felt like a missed opportunity to start phasing in 48v DC power. Very disappointing.
- scalablenotions 4y ago
  As someone who tinkers with these things a lot, I'm happy for the voltage I'm playing with not to be increased. There's plenty of scope to improve the plug design without approaching anything near the fragility of this nVidia adapter. There's no pressing need to increase voltage.
  - pathartl 4y ago
    The fragility I think is the main concern here, like you said. I hate when I have three 12v, 8 pin connectors on my GPU. I would be ecstatic between that and a small connector that catches fire if it's not perfectly 100% seated and strain relieved.
  - mmoskal 4y ago
    I believe 48V would be used since 50V is the maximum voltage considered "safe" for humans. This is also why USB-C goes up to 48V.
    - 4y ago
Varloom 4y ago
Why is the card has NOT been recalled already by now? Are they waiting for some major house fire news to break out before doing something.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  Nvidia would be wise to push a patch limiting the power consumption to safe levels, and offer a "hot-rod mode" as a kernel parameter or something.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    Benchmarks (and therefore profits) would probably take a hit if so, hence they are not doing it.
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      Which cards are even competitive with the 3090, much less the 4080? It's perfectly acceptable for Nvidia to admit they were wrong about power scaling if they offer an unlocked mode for idiots in fireproof houses.
      - m-p-3 4y ago
        The RX 7900 XT should be fairly close and at a lower wattage.
      - squeaky-clean 4y ago
        I got a nice settlement check from AMD who had to admit that their 8 core CPUs were actually 4 core CPUs with dual parallel math units. I'm pretty sure a post-launch reduction in power and performance of these cards would qualify any current owners for a refund.
        Y_Y 4y ago
        Nvidia are doing something like this now advertising their CUDA TOPS as double their actual value but with a footnote telling you this is for "sparse" multiplications. Here "sparse" means each dot-product can assume half of each input vector is zero.
dheera 4y ago
Why don't they put thermistors next to each connector and detect conditions like this early? $1 addition to a $10000 device.
- hypertele-Xii 4y ago
  Greed.
- kube-system 4y ago
  If you correctly predicted that your connector would overheat, the obvious solution is not to detect the issue but to fix the design.
  - dheera 4y ago
    You can't correctly predict, that's why you have safeguards.
    - deleted 4y ago
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    - kube-system 4y ago
      Connectors are not something that should ever get hot. Throwing thermistors all over a GPU to prevent it from catching on fire, is like putting bandaids in a box of cheerios so when the razor blades cut you, you can stop the bleeding. Cheerios should instead never have razors in them.
      - dheera 4y ago
        Connectors are not something that should ever get hot. > Correct, that's why you can have a system to check if any connector is getting hot. > Throwing thermistors all over a GPU to prevent it from catching on fire, is like putting bandaids in a box of cheerios so when the razor blades cut you, you can stop the bleeding. Cheerios should instead never have razors in them. No, it's more like having a smoke detector in a house. Sure, household equipment shouldn't suddenly catch fire, but sometimes they do.
epolanski 4y ago
I love how this issue somehow is bigger than the cards costing 2000 euros and drawing 600 watt if not more.
- hypertele-Xii 4y ago
  Fire hazard has the potential to cost lives. Lives are more expensive than 2000 euros or 600 watts of electricity, even at current prices.
- deleted 4y ago
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- rowanG077 4y ago
  Because either of those are chump change to an entire family dying in a blaze of fire, maybe?
- caslon 4y ago
  Power is nearly-free in civilized countries, a couple thousand isn't much for the developer & hobbyist market the card is aimed at, and by virtue of being well-off, the expenses to cover those two demographics' housing costs in case of a fire is quite great.
  - AdrianB1 4y ago
    > Power is nearly-free in civilized countries Western Europe crying under the bed ...
  - epolanski 4y ago
    > Power is nearly-free in civilized countries It really isn't in Europe. > a couple thousand isn't much for the developer & hobbyist market the card is aimed at Why would a developer be the target of a gaming gpu? This GPU is for hardware and gaming enthusiasts with sufficiently deep pockets.
RedShift1 4y ago
These RTX4090 cards are absolutely gigantic, why would an engineer choose such a small power connector? There's plenty of room for largers connectors or multiple connectors.
- Saris 4y ago
  Or at least have current sensing and thermal sensing inside the card on each supply rail at the connector header, so it can fault if something goes wrong.
- fooey 4y ago
  the actual PCB is not overly big, it's the cooler that's massive
riquito 4y ago
EVGA decision [1] to stop selling NVIDIA cards looks every day smarter [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32870677 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32870677
- abracadaniel 4y ago
  They reportedly made some prototype 4000 series cards, so I wonder if they saw a problem in the spec and that was the final straw.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    That's what I'm thinking, too. EVGA seems like a pretty reliable manufacturer in my experience, their bus-powered 1050 Ti lasted me 7 years and still runs in my brother's PC, to my knowledge. Wouldn't surprise me if Nvidia rejected some board revision EVGA suggested, which led to the ensuing fallout.
    - aidenn0 4y ago
      I'm still looking for a good replacement to my EVGA bus-powered 1050Ti. I just want a bus-powered GPU that can run desktop applications. I have a separate one with a power connector for ML stuff.
      - smoldesu 4y ago
        Are the new Intel GPUs bus powered? If not, they could make a killing off of frugal Linux users by offering a chip designed around the ~70w TDP of a PCI bus.
        aidenn0 4y ago
        I think the A380 is, but the only one I can find is ASRock and is too tall to fit in my case.
        4y ago
maxwell86 4y ago
> xactly for how they implemented and supply a 12V solution (which includes both the physical products they supply, and the messaging they've put out around it) which this article yet again underlines as being both real, and even worse than initially thought. I'd recommend people gloating to read the article. EDIT: (see my edit below). The conclussions are clear: - The problem is NOT the new connection; that's fine. New PSUs come with a connection that does not need any adaptor and those are safe and work fine. - The problem is a poor quality adaptor shipped with 4090s for people that buy a 1600$ GFX but then skimp on a new PSU and want to pair it with an old one (EDIT: skimp is out of place and victim blaming, I'd guess it would be more appropiate to have said here that NVIDIA and partners decided to add an adapter to avoid suggesting that users need a new PSU). These adaptors are distributed by NVIDIA but build by a supplier. Igor's recommendation is, I quote: "NVIDIA has to take its own supplier to task here, and replacing the adapters in circulation would actually be the least they could do.". EDIT: This comment can be misunderstood as me speculating whether the OP read the article or not. I am not speculating: the OP did not read the article, which claims the opposite of what the OP claims. The OP claims that 12V solutions are the issue, while the article states that they are fine, and as proof shows that new PSUs implement them correctly. In fact the _goal_ of the article is to set the record straight about this, by precising that the only problem is the quality of the adapter, not 12 V per se. So this comment is not an speculation about whether the OP read the article or not, but a response to set the record straight for those who might read OPs comment only, but not the article (I often come to HN for the comments more than the articles, so I'd find such a comment helpful myself).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dylan604 4y ago
  But does the inclusion of a shoddy adapter not just encourage the usage of the older PSU?
  - cptskippy 4y ago
    The problem isn't with older PSUs, they can work fine with a good adapter. The problem is with the adapter design, it is not just one bad choice but multiple layers of negligence that compound the issue. * The adapter has 6 pins all bridged together by thin connections that can break. * 4 heavy gauge wires are attached to those pins with a surface mount solder joint. They're not through hole soldered which would provide more contact AND far greater strength. They're not crimped which would provide the best contact and strength. * There's no strain relief. So if you hold the cables close to where they're soldered to the connector and flex it you can easily break those surface mount solder joints. * Because the 6 pins / 4 wires are all bridged asymmetrically, some bridges have more current passing through them and if they're fatigued or damaged they'll have higher resistance. Higher resistance means more heat. Overall it's just really poorly engineered on multiple levels. It's diarrhea poured over-top an open face shit sandwich.
dsign 4y ago
I'm going to be the dissenting voice here. The connector is shoddy, and it's good entertainment value for me personally who can't afford the card. But that beast of a card, despite all the amps and watts it swallows, is a very affordable tool for computational tinkerers--think people working in their garage in the next molecular simulation software or AI application--not to mention graphical artists and architects. True, you can get more computational power by paying for cloud services, but a cloud workstation with 32 Gigabytes of RAM without any GPU will cost you 1700 USD/mo in AWS, and you will have to connect through a RDP interface that just hurts. So, back to the connector, I hope Nvidia and third party manufacturers solve it. I will wait to burn the bridges until the day when they decide they won't sell the cards anymore and instead rent them at the same price that Amazon does. We don't need another Adobe.
- Retric 4y ago
  A fire hazard is a major concern no matter what the card can or can’t do. Anyway, for home tinkering the 4090 is generally a minor improvement over a 4080 or even vastly cheaper cards. More is better, but not always by very much. That said, the real value of cloud services is you can sometimes get more done with 2TB of RAM for 4 hours than you can with 32GB of RAM for 4 months. All without the need to have that much computing power anywhere near you.
  - dsign 4y ago
    > That said, the real value of cloud services is you can sometimes get more done with 2TB of RAM for 4 hours than you can with 32GB of RAM for 4 months. All without the need to have that much computing power anywhere near you. I know that. Alas, I can't get more programming done with 2TB of RAM in 4 hours than I can get with 32GB in three years. Human limitations.
beebeepka 4y ago
This whole thing is cracking me up. I guess this is why the 600w card didn't show up. Maybe there was something to the pre launch reports about cards melting themselves. You know what would teach Nvidia? Buying more 4090 cards at crazy prices. Vote with your wallets. Wait on actual lines to give them more money for stupid products. Moar powah, more upscaling crap, more latency. Moar
t3estabc 4y ago
this is a testthis is a testthis is a testthis is a testthis is a testthis is a testthis is a test
dang 4y ago
Recent and related: Users report Nvidia RTX 4090 GPUs with melted 16-pin power connectors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33327515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33327515 - Oct 2022 (99 comments)
bromuk 4y ago
EVGA breaking away from working with NVIDIA was a warning sign of things to come.
EugeneOZ 4y ago
well, mine works fine (with multiple hours of heavy usage), the card itself is quite cold (48-65 C), but the news is worrying, for sure... Gigabyte promised 4 years warranty - I hope they’ll keep their promise.
mjsweet 4y ago
Please shoot me down in flames if needed, but maybe the CPU should be on a riser board and the GPU on the mainboard? Look, it seems to me that Nvidia needs to come up with its own x86 reference platform that revolves around supplying enough resources to the GPU rather than relying on adding layer upon layer of bandaid solutions. Listen, I'm not an engineer, and I don't claim to understand voltage, amps and watts, but it seems plainly obvious that if Nvidia wants to keep pushing discreet components that need a lot of juice (as opposed to Apples SoC strategy), then they need to come up with their own robust reference platform. On another note, did EVGA see all this coming?
- some-guy 4y ago
  I was looking at an old video card I have, the GeForce 4600ti, and remembering thinking it was _huge_ at the time compared to my Voodoo 3 3000 before it. Then the 8800gt seemed huge. Then the RX480. Then my current 3070. At a certain point it's just stupid. My work laptop (Macbook Pro M1 Max) can do some very impressive stuff in such a small quiet package, and it just makes sense to go with a single large APU in the future.
  - mjsweet 4y ago
    I know what you are saying, I have an M1 Pro MBP, and the thing is as quiet as a church mouse. It just seems to me like Apple (with the trashcan) painted themselves into a corner with thermals. Then Intel did the same by missing node generations and are just pumping more current (or voltage, heck I don't get electricity). Now Nvidia is doing the same now with an aging reference platform that needs an overhaul. I feel that it's simplistic to say that Apple has the right strategy with APU's, because gamers want faster and faster gaming performance whereas Apple are making custom silicon for very narrow use cases (namely video editing) and consumers perusing the internet and organising photos. Funnily enough, I do think that Apple have the right formula longer term for general purpose computing with APU's. It just that if Nvidia want to keep pumping out bigger and bigger GPU's while upping the voltage and heat then things need to change. The x86 platform needs a page one rewrite. EVGA opted out.
  - dotnet00 4y ago
tpmx 4y ago
My guess: The Taiwanese companies that build most of the GPU boards will supply a fix sooner than Nvidia. This is not exactly a hard thing to competently and cost-efficently build in Taiwan.
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chucklenorris 4y ago
The 4090 is a stupid card pushed way past the efficiency sweetspot for a few percent in performance so NVidia can claim they have the fastest card. The power is insane - 600w is more than the rest of the computer. The cooling solutions are ridiculous - 3.5 slot card and 2.5kg for the rog strix version. Benchmarks show that you can set the power limit to 60% to get 95% of performance in games along with better thermals, noise, etc.
- samspenc 4y ago
  I wonder if Nvidia is cranking up the performance not for games, but other applications such as 3D rendering and AI/ML. If you look at the benchmarks for Blender [1], a popular open-source 3D software, you will see the 4090 easily beats out all the other competitors, with 2x the rendering speed of the second on that list, which is another Nvidia RTX card (3090) that used to be the fastest till the 4090 came along. [1] https://opendata.blender.org/ https://opendata.blender.org/
bullen 4y ago
I downgraded to passive low profile MSI 1030 DDR5 on all machines. It runs ALL games today and my guess is forever because of peak litography. 30W should be enough.
- deleted 4y ago
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dleslie 4y ago
I expect AAA games will move away from discrete rendering techniques and towards cloud-assisted AI rendering within the next five to ten years. Cards like this beast may be the Plymouth Barracuda of this PC era.
- rasz 4y ago
  We could call it Stadia 2.0
  - dleslie 4y ago
    Final frame composition can occur on the home PC to avoid input latency concerns. I envision some combination of LFNs and diffusion; you could produce near approximations of likely desired scenes and have the client select and refine WRT its input and previous state.

293 points by elorant 4y ago

whatever1123 4y ago

malfist 4y ago
Nice of you to blame everyone. What's your proposal to fix it?
- whatever1123 4y ago
  - malfist 4y ago
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colechristensen 4y ago
It's not individual contributors responsible for bad quality. It is corporate, investing, and all around culture that does not value quality and barely has a sense of it at all (Steve Jobs was an asshole, but he had a strong sense of quality, it doesn't matter if you agree with his choices, that's taste, it's hard to argue that things he drove apple to produce had quality) People instead value deadlines, ever advancing middle manager careers, and tiny differences in margin percentages.
- outworlder 4y ago
  > It's not individual contributors responsible for bad quality. > It is corporate When dealing with corporations, that's _always_ the case. Even if it turns out that a single person was able to make a large mistake that went unnoticed, guess what, it's still a corporate failure. > People instead value deadlines, ever advancing middle manager careers, and tiny differences in margin percentages. Of these, the managers trying to advance are the most harmful. I've seen situations where actions of managers trying to advance their careers actually caused harm to the company, but they were able to place the blame elsewhere. Some are pretty good at that.
- whatever1123 4y ago
  > People instead value deadlines This is definitely true, and is a cultural thing, and deadlines are like, one of the most quintessentially big corpo dysfunctions ever. > It's not individual contributors When you have a surgical complication, do you blame the admins and the hospital bureaucracy? No. When you lose a court case, who's fault is it? Do you blame the clerks? Do you blame the Attorney General? No. > does not value quality and barely has a sense of it at all I haven't met an "individual contributor" who cares about that shit in my life. Among the ones who do a lot of work all day, the rare few, the guys with the greasy hair and the track pants who live alone in Sunnyvale for a year, they have consistently been the least interested in a holistic sense of quality. You will say, oh the managers gave them the goals. Dude the managers do fucking nothing. They say the same shit to everyone, the "IC" has all the agency. They can work, or not work as much as they want. In fact the hardest working ICs I know are relentlessly optimizing for meeting immediate, dull goals. The ICs are almost always working on consumer products that are tremendously shitty and buggy. Listen, who the fuck is responsible? Everyone! Why do you give the trackpants guys a pass? They're dicks!
- btown 4y ago
  The conundrum is: how do you build an organization that can simultaneously scale super-linearly and retain a commitment to quality? There are plenty of businesses that pursue stable profitability or linear growth and maintain quality. But the faster an organization grows, the more it becomes metrics-driven, and outside of a regulated industry where quality is a requirement, it's hard to balance the priorities. I'm reminded of Honeycomb's pointed experiment in setting up a rotating employee seat as a voting member of their board: https://www.protocol.com/workplace/board-of-directors-honeycomb-engineer https://www.protocol.com/workplace/board-of-directors-honeyc... - this type of thing can contribute towards striking the right balance at all levels of an organization. But it's definitely not a solved problem.
  - colechristensen 4y ago
    Apple did by having a quality dictator at the top. It would have lasted a lot longer but his unusual disposition led him to accidentally kill himself with a strange diet. In other words you can’t have a company run by the MBA mindset, there must be a superseding set of values beyond business school values.
    - deleted 4y ago
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radicaldreamer 4y ago
Seems like you have a chip on your shoulder that has nothing to do with the topic at hand.
- wruza 4y ago
  The sentiment is agreeable though. You see smart people everywhere, but then turn to their products and these have obvious flaws. Not hidden ones, not triggered in particular situation. Ones you can’t ignore, which greet you and tell they are your new neighbors happy to meet you everyday. MDN recently screwed up their search input. It stays collapsed until you click on it (some brightest mind decided it’d be so cool?), and also there is no I-cursor until you start typing. So confusing. CDNJS recently “updated” their site so you see a search prompt, (maybe) click on it, start typing aaand it loses all letters you’ve typed before 3-4 seconds passed since the page load. Who allowed to push that into production? That there is some guy responsible for this may drive nuts. I could go on but am depressed enough atm.
Ygg2 4y ago
> Why are third party amateurs solving this? They have a vested interest. The real issue is Moore's law is on its last legs and you can't squeeze blood from stone. So manufacturer resorted to increasing TDP and bringing us closer to voltage that are more likely to cause issues. As for general shittiness. That's been going since - forever. Not sure why you're complaining. It's both incorrect and offtopic. Race to the bottom is as old as human civilization.
tester756 4y ago
You just realized that the world runs on mediocrity? PS: think of it when visiting doc, mechanic, etc :)
- whatever1123 4y ago
  I don't know dude. Ironically if you are poor in a place like Boston, you can go to Man's Greatest Hospital. Programmers were definitely elite at one point. The gulf between them and the medicine kids has grown a lot.
  - snovv_crash 4y ago
    I guess you haven't used the medical system recently - despite monumental efforts by doctors, the standard of care is actually horrific when you take the whole system into account. It has turned into a system of keeping patients alive rather than delivering optimal outcomes, and much like the legal system, if you have someone knowledgeable who can put in considerable time on your case your outcomes will be a lot better.
    - deleted 4y ago
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LeifCarrotson 4y ago
If a single PM can screw up this badly, that's a complete failure of the NVIDIA bureaucracy. The answer to the "5 whys" should never be that one individual made a bad decision, when the bad decision has consequences of this magnitude. It's a systems issue.
- deleted 4y ago
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nomel 4y ago
And this is why hardware is hard; it requires good engineering culture. Unfortunately, being meticulous is directly opposed to profit. You have look at the likes of Apple to find good hardware culture, where "image" has a higher priority, allowing that engineering culture to flex a bit more than usual.
- cogman10 4y ago
  The thing that sucks is a culture turning bad does not immediately result in loss of sales or revenue. Once you get big enough, your culture can decline for years or even decades. Yet in the first, second, or even third year of terrible culture changes, a business will likely be patting themselves on the backs for how fast they got stuff out the door and how much money they saved by reducing head count.
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badkitty99 4y ago

TheRealPomax 4y ago

I'm not sure people have been yelling that the spec or form factor are the problem, they've been yelling that NVIDIA is the problem, exactly for how they implemented and supply a 12V solution (which includes both the physical products they supply, and the messaging they've put out around it) which this article yet again underlines as being both real, and even worse than initially thought. No need to beat about the bush, the "certain celebrities" is folks like JayzTwoCents who are willing to destroy their relationship with NVIDIA over this by showing that a company intentionally sells products they know are fire hazards, lied about that to the public, doubled down on the lies when they got called out on it the more people staretd reporting on it, and kept doing so all the way up to when official paperwork showed they knew about the issue and went ahead with it all along. The initial reports were "this is dangerous", but escalated to "NVIDIA knew this would could catch fire and pushed for sales anyway, this cannot be okay". If this was a cable that just bricked cards, or even entire computers, that's a dick move but it's just a computer. No one died, just some hardware got destroyed. However, that's not what it does: it can literally start fires and people can die, and there is publicly available documentation that shows that NVIDIA is strictly liable (in the legal sense) for gross negligence (again in the legal sense). NVIDIA should be all kinds of sued and federally fined here.

aftbit 4y ago
I was with you until: "and fined for half their annual profits by the FCC". Not only is that not the FCC's job, but that's an insane fine for a relatively small problem. If anything, NVIDIA should be required to recall the adapters and replace them with working ones at their cost, and maybe pre-fund a settlement fund to pay out in cases of damage due to this connector.
- TheRealPomax 4y ago
  Fair enough, changed it to just federally fined. But maybe going "we know this can cause fires, we're going to sell it anyway" should come with an insane fine. If you're willing to burn down the place for sales, see if you can recover from the same being done to you. And if you can't, maybe that should be the price for prioritising sales over human lives.

fazfq 4y ago

Maybe I am running low on coffee because I felt like I was having a stroke while reading this post. >However, the “safe” is only valid if e.g. the used supply lines from the power supply with “native” 12VHPWR connector have a good quality and 16AWG lines or at least the used 12VHPWR to 4x 6+2 pin adapter also offers what it promises. Like what is this? I know those words, but that sentence makes no sense.

ideamotor 4y ago
Actually, that is NOT (as such), “how I feel” when I read articles like this - NOT written by professionals (But who is one anyways) - Confucius says, which I tend to agree, which if you, like me, concur.
cmsj 4y ago
Igor is awesome, but his English has to be read with a generous spirit ;)
- ideamotor 4y ago
  I didn’t realize the author was non-native so now I feel bad, thank you.
NotYourLawyer 4y ago
His English is way more comprehensible than my German.
- programmer_dude 4y ago
  Do you also write incomprehensible articles in German? :)
treeman79 4y ago
That’s exactly what it feels like to have a mild stroke. I know these words individually.
dheera 4y ago

rob-olmos 4y ago

Was there a good reason why they switched from 3x8pin to 1x12pin for so much wattage?

cmsj 4y ago
They started this in the last generation where the founders cards had a different-but-similar connector. In this generation, they would actually need 4x8pin to reach the 600W maximum these cards are supposed to be able to draw in a fully overclocked state, so really this just comes down to PCB space, but with the draw getting this high, the cable also has some signalling wires so the card knows how many Watts it should limit itself to.
- rob-olmos 4y ago
  Ah interesting, thanks. Looking more into it, 4x8pin would be 12x12v wires/pins, and the 12VHPWR only has 6x12v for the same max wattage.
- bcrosby95 4y ago
  As someone ignorant to this space, considering the PCB is already shorter than the heatsink, I assume the problem is more of re-arranging other components on the PCB than the actual physical space the final product takes up.
Latty 4y ago
I mean, firstly just that consumers hate having to plug in a ton of cables: it's bad for aesthetics, it's annoying to manage the cables, etc... The bigger reason is probably to save board space as nvidia have been shrinking the form factor of the actual boards so they can dedicate more room to flow-through cooling. Connectors take up a lot of board edge. The new spec does also have data pins so the devices can negotiate for power which could in theory reduce issues and inform the consumer better about limits with future PSUs and devices. So there are advantages to the new spec, both specifically with the form factor and more generally.

cmsj 4y ago

Buildzoid on YouTube has a very good response to this - he does not agree that the fault is the (still terrible) wires at the back of the connector. His reasoning is that the melting is happening down at the pin end of the connector, not at the back, and the pins that are melting the most are the edge ones, not the middle ones. There's about 10 minutes of critique of the various ways other people have been evaluating it, which is interesting for sure, but the meat starts here: https://youtu.be/yvSetyi9vj8?t=744 https://youtu.be/yvSetyi9vj8?t=744

deng 4y ago
I agree, that does not make sense. There must be a problem with the connection to the pins, and I'd really like to see a close-up of the female connector on the problematic card, because if stuff gets bend there out of shape even slightly, you can quickly get high resistance. EDIT: Watched the video further, and actually the cable has the female side and they're using 2-split connectors. Yeah, that's asking for trouble when you push 50 amps through those... Sheesh, such shoddy stuff for a 1600$ card, just incredible.
washadjeffmad 4y ago
The failure doesn't necessarily have to happen at the junctions for the junctions to be a cause. It also makes sense that the edge pins would heat up more because they're both surrounded by less mass and a likelier conduit to distribute current and heat based on the resistivity of the shown wiring. Reminds me of the molded MOLEX to SATA adapters for HDDs that suffer from similarly shoddy wiring design and are prone to melting/fires. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAyy_WOSdVc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAyy_WOSdVc
- deng 4y ago
  > The failure doesn't necessarily have to happen at the junctions for the junctions to be a cause. Indeed, it can also happen that because some connection is failing, too much current flows through the remaining ones, but this is clearly not what is happening here (because it's not the inner connectors that are melting, and also because Igor tried and couldn't replicate this). This really looks like heat from high resistance, and the outer connectors are simply those experiencing the most mechanical stress, and it's really easy for these 2-slit-connectors to get bend out of shape.

mensetmanusman 4y ago

Training cat detection melts cables.

MBCook 4y ago

Perhaps this wouldn’t be a problem if the cards didn’t need 1700W (estimated). Maybe this is not just a bad design, but physics trying to warn us this path isn’t smart.

TwoNineA 4y ago
> Perhaps this wouldn’t be a problem if the cards didn’t need 1700W (estimated). [citation needed]
- MBCook 4y ago
  That was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, thus the “(estimated)” part. Hooray for the clarity of sarcasm in text. Sigh. I know it’s not that bad. A standard wall circuit can’t supply that much power. But I find the power levels graphics cards have gotten to crazy and think that’s what we should be solving, not how to supply them more power without things melting.
cmsj 4y ago
That's an interesting estimate ;) The 12VHPWR connector is actually rated for up to 600W.
rjh29 4y ago
4090's TDP is 450W, and it demonstrably runs on 850W PSUs. If the cables are rated high enough and the PSU is large enough, there is no wattage that is "less valid" than any other. The 3090 TI from the previous generation runs at 450W too, it just uses 3x6+2 cables rather than nvidia's fancy adapter.
bcrosby95 4y ago
It's ok, I'm sure your comment won't be sarcasm in a generation or two. I'm looking forward to the day my PC uses more electricity than my air conditioning. With the power of GeForce I might see that day.

zepmck 4y ago

People pretending to do professional work with low budget/quality workstation. If you cannot afford to operate a 4090 according to specs, you cannot blame NVIDIA if things go wrong.

Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
What spec do you think users are violating?
mceachen 4y ago
My understanding is that the failure is the included power adapter. If I spend both of $1600USD on a product, I assume the included adapter will work.
gambiting 4y ago
Eh? What are you talking about? The part melting and damaging the card is the adapter that's literally provided by Nvidia. How is this "not according to spec"????

dvdkon 4y ago

Here I am, crimping wires for a 3D printer that will draw at most a quarter of the current, and NVIDIA is just giving out connectors with shoddily soldered connections? Shame! It also looks like they think strain relief is optional. EDIT: This is a crimped wire for ATX power connectors: https://modmymods.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/a86a6471cd126c7d06b2a398b3c8a4ae/3/0/30cm-mf-orange-1.jpg https://modmymods.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/a8... Notice that the insulation is also crimped, making sure that the actual electrical connection doesn't flex.

NotYourLawyer 4y ago
Soldering is perfectly fine, if you do it correctly.
- programmer_dude 4y ago
  It's not fine if it's going to melt.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    It will only melt if it’s either undersized or a bad joint to begin with. A properly-sized, well-made solder joint will have no reason to melt unless heated externally by something else failing.
- jmole 4y ago
  soldering is a terrible idea for cables that need to flex, which is why you’ll typically only find them used in applications with major strain relief, or inside non-user-serviceable enclosures (e.g. inside an ATX PSU)
  - snovv_crash 4y ago
    You need strain relief either way, soldering or crimping. A well soldered joint will have lower resistance than a crimped one and be more resistant to vibrations.

Mountain_Skies 4y ago

Coming soon to the EU: graphics cards powered by three USB-C connectors.

empiricus 4y ago
Actually graphics cards will be interdicted because they consume too much electric power. Just like high-end TVs next year.
CamperBob2 4y ago
That's not the dumbest idea in the world. The USB people had the sense to use a higher voltage to keep the I^2*R losses down. USB PD 3.1 can handle 240 watts over an appropriately-rated Type C cable, so 3 such cables could handle the load with some margin to spare. PC power supplies could do worse than to move in that direction.

bri3d 4y ago

I'm curious as to why no vendor has yet tried to push a 24V or 48V PSU rail standard to reduce the amperage pushed over these crappy pins. Of course then the board itself needs to be able to handle the higher voltage for down-conversion, but don't these systems usually use switching / Buck regulators as the first stage anyway, which could easily be tuned to handle the higher input voltage with minimal loss added?

LarsAlereon 4y ago
The Power Stamp Alliance was working on 48v modular VRMs for HPC and servers, but I haven't seen any news in the past couple of years.
allenrb 4y ago
Yes, exactly. Even before this issue, ATX 3.0 felt like a missed opportunity to start phasing in 48v DC power. Very disappointing.
scalablenotions 4y ago
As someone who tinkers with these things a lot, I'm happy for the voltage I'm playing with not to be increased. There's plenty of scope to improve the plug design without approaching anything near the fragility of this nVidia adapter. There's no pressing need to increase voltage.
- pathartl 4y ago
  The fragility I think is the main concern here, like you said. I hate when I have three 12v, 8 pin connectors on my GPU. I would be ecstatic between that and a small connector that catches fire if it's not perfectly 100% seated and strain relieved.
- mmoskal 4y ago
  I believe 48V would be used since 50V is the maximum voltage considered "safe" for humans. This is also why USB-C goes up to 48V.
  - 4y ago

Varloom 4y ago

Why is the card has NOT been recalled already by now? Are they waiting for some major house fire news to break out before doing something.

smoldesu 4y ago
Nvidia would be wise to push a patch limiting the power consumption to safe levels, and offer a "hot-rod mode" as a kernel parameter or something.
- capableweb 4y ago
  Benchmarks (and therefore profits) would probably take a hit if so, hence they are not doing it.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    Which cards are even competitive with the 3090, much less the 4080? It's perfectly acceptable for Nvidia to admit they were wrong about power scaling if they offer an unlocked mode for idiots in fireproof houses.
    - m-p-3 4y ago
      The RX 7900 XT should be fairly close and at a lower wattage.
    - squeaky-clean 4y ago
      I got a nice settlement check from AMD who had to admit that their 8 core CPUs were actually 4 core CPUs with dual parallel math units. I'm pretty sure a post-launch reduction in power and performance of these cards would qualify any current owners for a refund.
      - Y_Y 4y ago
        Nvidia are doing something like this now advertising their CUDA TOPS as double their actual value but with a footnote telling you this is for "sparse" multiplications. Here "sparse" means each dot-product can assume half of each input vector is zero.

dheera 4y ago

Why don't they put thermistors next to each connector and detect conditions like this early? $1 addition to a $10000 device.

hypertele-Xii 4y ago
Greed.
kube-system 4y ago
If you correctly predicted that your connector would overheat, the obvious solution is not to detect the issue but to fix the design.
- dheera 4y ago
  You can't correctly predict, that's why you have safeguards.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - kube-system 4y ago
    Connectors are not something that should ever get hot. Throwing thermistors all over a GPU to prevent it from catching on fire, is like putting bandaids in a box of cheerios so when the razor blades cut you, you can stop the bleeding. Cheerios should instead never have razors in them.
    - dheera 4y ago
      Connectors are not something that should ever get hot. > Correct, that's why you can have a system to check if any connector is getting hot. > Throwing thermistors all over a GPU to prevent it from catching on fire, is like putting bandaids in a box of cheerios so when the razor blades cut you, you can stop the bleeding. Cheerios should instead never have razors in them. No, it's more like having a smoke detector in a house. Sure, household equipment shouldn't suddenly catch fire, but sometimes they do.

epolanski 4y ago

I love how this issue somehow is bigger than the cards costing 2000 euros and drawing 600 watt if not more.

hypertele-Xii 4y ago
Fire hazard has the potential to cost lives. Lives are more expensive than 2000 euros or 600 watts of electricity, even at current prices.
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rowanG077 4y ago
Because either of those are chump change to an entire family dying in a blaze of fire, maybe?
caslon 4y ago
Power is nearly-free in civilized countries, a couple thousand isn't much for the developer & hobbyist market the card is aimed at, and by virtue of being well-off, the expenses to cover those two demographics' housing costs in case of a fire is quite great.
- AdrianB1 4y ago
  > Power is nearly-free in civilized countries Western Europe crying under the bed ...
- epolanski 4y ago
  > Power is nearly-free in civilized countries It really isn't in Europe. > a couple thousand isn't much for the developer & hobbyist market the card is aimed at Why would a developer be the target of a gaming gpu? This GPU is for hardware and gaming enthusiasts with sufficiently deep pockets.

RedShift1 4y ago

These RTX4090 cards are absolutely gigantic, why would an engineer choose such a small power connector? There's plenty of room for largers connectors or multiple connectors.

Saris 4y ago
Or at least have current sensing and thermal sensing inside the card on each supply rail at the connector header, so it can fault if something goes wrong.
fooey 4y ago
the actual PCB is not overly big, it's the cooler that's massive

riquito 4y ago

EVGA decision [1] to stop selling NVIDIA cards looks every day smarter [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32870677 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32870677

abracadaniel 4y ago
They reportedly made some prototype 4000 series cards, so I wonder if they saw a problem in the spec and that was the final straw.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  That's what I'm thinking, too. EVGA seems like a pretty reliable manufacturer in my experience, their bus-powered 1050 Ti lasted me 7 years and still runs in my brother's PC, to my knowledge. Wouldn't surprise me if Nvidia rejected some board revision EVGA suggested, which led to the ensuing fallout.
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    I'm still looking for a good replacement to my EVGA bus-powered 1050Ti. I just want a bus-powered GPU that can run desktop applications. I have a separate one with a power connector for ML stuff.
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      Are the new Intel GPUs bus powered? If not, they could make a killing off of frugal Linux users by offering a chip designed around the ~70w TDP of a PCI bus.
      - aidenn0 4y ago
        I think the A380 is, but the only one I can find is ASRock and is too tall to fit in my case.
        4y ago

maxwell86 4y ago

> xactly for how they implemented and supply a 12V solution (which includes both the physical products they supply, and the messaging they've put out around it) which this article yet again underlines as being both real, and even worse than initially thought. I'd recommend people gloating to read the article. EDIT: (see my edit below). The conclussions are clear: - The problem is NOT the new connection; that's fine. New PSUs come with a connection that does not need any adaptor and those are safe and work fine. - The problem is a poor quality adaptor shipped with 4090s for people that buy a 1600$ GFX but then skimp on a new PSU and want to pair it with an old one (EDIT: skimp is out of place and victim blaming, I'd guess it would be more appropiate to have said here that NVIDIA and partners decided to add an adapter to avoid suggesting that users need a new PSU). These adaptors are distributed by NVIDIA but build by a supplier. Igor's recommendation is, I quote: "NVIDIA has to take its own supplier to task here, and replacing the adapters in circulation would actually be the least they could do.". EDIT: This comment can be misunderstood as me speculating whether the OP read the article or not. I am not speculating: the OP did not read the article, which claims the opposite of what the OP claims. The OP claims that 12V solutions are the issue, while the article states that they are fine, and as proof shows that new PSUs implement them correctly. In fact the _goal_ of the article is to set the record straight about this, by precising that the only problem is the quality of the adapter, not 12 V per se. So this comment is not an speculation about whether the OP read the article or not, but a response to set the record straight for those who might read OPs comment only, but not the article (I often come to HN for the comments more than the articles, so I'd find such a comment helpful myself).

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dylan604 4y ago
But does the inclusion of a shoddy adapter not just encourage the usage of the older PSU?
- cptskippy 4y ago
  The problem isn't with older PSUs, they can work fine with a good adapter. The problem is with the adapter design, it is not just one bad choice but multiple layers of negligence that compound the issue. * The adapter has 6 pins all bridged together by thin connections that can break. * 4 heavy gauge wires are attached to those pins with a surface mount solder joint. They're not through hole soldered which would provide more contact AND far greater strength. They're not crimped which would provide the best contact and strength. * There's no strain relief. So if you hold the cables close to where they're soldered to the connector and flex it you can easily break those surface mount solder joints. * Because the 6 pins / 4 wires are all bridged asymmetrically, some bridges have more current passing through them and if they're fatigued or damaged they'll have higher resistance. Higher resistance means more heat. Overall it's just really poorly engineered on multiple levels. It's diarrhea poured over-top an open face shit sandwich.

dsign 4y ago

I'm going to be the dissenting voice here. The connector is shoddy, and it's good entertainment value for me personally who can't afford the card. But that beast of a card, despite all the amps and watts it swallows, is a very affordable tool for computational tinkerers--think people working in their garage in the next molecular simulation software or AI application--not to mention graphical artists and architects. True, you can get more computational power by paying for cloud services, but a cloud workstation with 32 Gigabytes of RAM without any GPU will cost you 1700 USD/mo in AWS, and you will have to connect through a RDP interface that just hurts. So, back to the connector, I hope Nvidia and third party manufacturers solve it. I will wait to burn the bridges until the day when they decide they won't sell the cards anymore and instead rent them at the same price that Amazon does. We don't need another Adobe.

Retric 4y ago
A fire hazard is a major concern no matter what the card can or can’t do. Anyway, for home tinkering the 4090 is generally a minor improvement over a 4080 or even vastly cheaper cards. More is better, but not always by very much. That said, the real value of cloud services is you can sometimes get more done with 2TB of RAM for 4 hours than you can with 32GB of RAM for 4 months. All without the need to have that much computing power anywhere near you.
- dsign 4y ago
  > That said, the real value of cloud services is you can sometimes get more done with 2TB of RAM for 4 hours than you can with 32GB of RAM for 4 months. All without the need to have that much computing power anywhere near you. I know that. Alas, I can't get more programming done with 2TB of RAM in 4 hours than I can get with 32GB in three years. Human limitations.

beebeepka 4y ago

This whole thing is cracking me up. I guess this is why the 600w card didn't show up. Maybe there was something to the pre launch reports about cards melting themselves. You know what would teach Nvidia? Buying more 4090 cards at crazy prices. Vote with your wallets. Wait on actual lines to give them more money for stupid products. Moar powah, more upscaling crap, more latency. Moar

t3estabc 4y ago

this is a testthis is a testthis is a testthis is a testthis is a testthis is a testthis is a test

dang 4y ago

Recent and related: Users report Nvidia RTX 4090 GPUs with melted 16-pin power connectors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33327515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33327515 - Oct 2022 (99 comments)

bromuk 4y ago

EVGA breaking away from working with NVIDIA was a warning sign of things to come.

EugeneOZ 4y ago

well, mine works fine (with multiple hours of heavy usage), the card itself is quite cold (48-65 C), but the news is worrying, for sure... Gigabyte promised 4 years warranty - I hope they’ll keep their promise.

mjsweet 4y ago

Please shoot me down in flames if needed, but maybe the CPU should be on a riser board and the GPU on the mainboard? Look, it seems to me that Nvidia needs to come up with its own x86 reference platform that revolves around supplying enough resources to the GPU rather than relying on adding layer upon layer of bandaid solutions. Listen, I'm not an engineer, and I don't claim to understand voltage, amps and watts, but it seems plainly obvious that if Nvidia wants to keep pushing discreet components that need a lot of juice (as opposed to Apples SoC strategy), then they need to come up with their own robust reference platform. On another note, did EVGA see all this coming?

some-guy 4y ago
I was looking at an old video card I have, the GeForce 4600ti, and remembering thinking it was _huge_ at the time compared to my Voodoo 3 3000 before it. Then the 8800gt seemed huge. Then the RX480. Then my current 3070. At a certain point it's just stupid. My work laptop (Macbook Pro M1 Max) can do some very impressive stuff in such a small quiet package, and it just makes sense to go with a single large APU in the future.
- mjsweet 4y ago
  I know what you are saying, I have an M1 Pro MBP, and the thing is as quiet as a church mouse. It just seems to me like Apple (with the trashcan) painted themselves into a corner with thermals. Then Intel did the same by missing node generations and are just pumping more current (or voltage, heck I don't get electricity). Now Nvidia is doing the same now with an aging reference platform that needs an overhaul. I feel that it's simplistic to say that Apple has the right strategy with APU's, because gamers want faster and faster gaming performance whereas Apple are making custom silicon for very narrow use cases (namely video editing) and consumers perusing the internet and organising photos. Funnily enough, I do think that Apple have the right formula longer term for general purpose computing with APU's. It just that if Nvidia want to keep pumping out bigger and bigger GPU's while upping the voltage and heat then things need to change. The x86 platform needs a page one rewrite. EVGA opted out.
- dotnet00 4y ago

tpmx 4y ago

My guess: The Taiwanese companies that build most of the GPU boards will supply a fix sooner than Nvidia. This is not exactly a hard thing to competently and cost-efficently build in Taiwan.

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chucklenorris 4y ago

The 4090 is a stupid card pushed way past the efficiency sweetspot for a few percent in performance so NVidia can claim they have the fastest card. The power is insane - 600w is more than the rest of the computer. The cooling solutions are ridiculous - 3.5 slot card and 2.5kg for the rog strix version. Benchmarks show that you can set the power limit to 60% to get 95% of performance in games along with better thermals, noise, etc.

samspenc 4y ago
I wonder if Nvidia is cranking up the performance not for games, but other applications such as 3D rendering and AI/ML. If you look at the benchmarks for Blender [1], a popular open-source 3D software, you will see the 4090 easily beats out all the other competitors, with 2x the rendering speed of the second on that list, which is another Nvidia RTX card (3090) that used to be the fastest till the 4090 came along. [1] https://opendata.blender.org/ https://opendata.blender.org/

bullen 4y ago

I downgraded to passive low profile MSI 1030 DDR5 on all machines. It runs ALL games today and my guess is forever because of peak litography. 30W should be enough.

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dleslie 4y ago

I expect AAA games will move away from discrete rendering techniques and towards cloud-assisted AI rendering within the next five to ten years. Cards like this beast may be the Plymouth Barracuda of this PC era.

rasz 4y ago
We could call it Stadia 2.0
- dleslie 4y ago
  Final frame composition can occur on the home PC to avoid input latency concerns. I envision some combination of LFNs and diffusion; you could produce near approximations of likely desired scenes and have the client select and refine WRT its input and previous state.