Nvidia has confirmed that it believes the melting energy cable downside that beset its RTX 4090 playing cards gained’t reoccur with the RTX 5090 cable. That’s regardless of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 consuming 125W extra energy than the RTX 4090.
Nvidia made the declare in a latest Q&A session at an editor’s day in South Korea. With customers set to fork out $2,000 for the brand new greatest graphics card in its class, one journalist requested the corporate instantly if the melting cable difficulty needs to be a priority for potential consumers.
In reply to the query, an Nvidia spokesperson acknowledged (machine translated): “We don’t count on such a phenomenon to happen with the RTX 50 sequence.” He goes on to say: “We made some modifications to the connector to reply to the [melting RTX 4090 cable] difficulty on the time, and now, about two years later, we perceive that the issue has not occurred.”
The modifications to which Nvidia is referring occurred in mid 2023 when the corporate switched the connector on its top-end playing cards from the unique 12VHPWR connector to a 12V-2×6 connector. The brand new design barely offset a number of the sign cables so they might solely join and allow the cardboard to perform when the essential high-current cables have been correctly seated.
The brand new connector did certainly appear to largely remedy the problem, as a lot of the issues with the playing cards appeared to stem from customers not totally inserting the cables, thus leaving too weak a connection for the large quantities of present being pulled by the cables. The small contact space creates a better resistance than regular, which ends up in extra warmth being generated by the contact. With the brand new connector, this potential to have a poor connection was largely resolved.
That stated, for a lot of months after the brand new connector was issued, restore retailers reported nonetheless getting a gradual stream of melted RTX 4090 playing cards. That’s why it’s nonetheless a priority for consumers and why there are industry-wide efforts to assist customers, with improvements comparable to MSI’s yellow cable connectors that in concept make it straightforward to see in case your cable isn’t correctly seated.
For extra on why you would possibly wish to contemplate shopping for this 575W monster of a GPU, take a look at our Nvidia RTX 5090 assessment, together with a check of its energy consumption, in addition to gaming efficiency with and with out DLSS 4 body technology.
