reddit user report The company’s BeQuiet Dark Power 13 1000W power supply suffered the same 12VHPWR melting catastrophe as some RTX 4090s. A user posted a photo of a power supply with 16-pin support. It is shown that the connector on the power side has completely melted. This suggests that there may still be serious reliability issues that need to be resolved with the new connector.
Melting down 16-pin connectors is nothing new, especially for power-hungry graphics cards like the RTX 4090. But it’s almost unheard of for a power supply connector to melt. This is especially true considering that the Dark Power 13 has native support for 16-pin cables, so no adapter is used.
RTX 4090 12vhpwr cable burnt on PSU side? from r/4090 burning
The image shows that the bottom row of pins on the connector itself (right next to the four “sense” pins) were completely destroyed in the melting process and are barely recognizable compared to the intact top row of pins. Likewise, the 16-pin power connector housed inside the PSU suffered similar damage, exposing melted plastic along the bottom row of ports.
However, this is an example of a burnt out 16-pin power connector on the power supply side and should be taken with a grain of salt. Without multiple reports, it’s impossible to determine how widespread the problem could be, or if this was a one-off on his part.
Nonetheless, this reflects a series of RTX 4090 meltdown reports that have come out over the past year. These reports aren’t about damage on the power side, but the GPU connector and the power connector are the same, so it’s technically possible to have the same damage on both ends. If this report is valid, it could be the start of a new wave of 16-pin disasters as more people continue to adopt 3rd generation power supplies.
tom’s hardware reached out to both Be Quiet! and Nvidia. A response from the PSU maker wasn’t ready for publication, while an Nvidia spokesperson said it may not receive a response for several days due to the company’s shutdown.
This issue couldn’t have happened at such a bad time, as there are still many reports of the RTX 4090 16-pin connector melting. NVIDIA claims that all 16-pin issues are related to the user’s error that the connector is not seated correctly. However, some of these latest reports are from people who claim to be seasoned system builders, so it’s hard to believe that all errors are due to user mistakes.
I hope this power issue with the 16 pin power connector doesn’t spread to more users. But when it does, it could become an even bigger problem for the graphics card and power supply industry.
