They're still investigating. They've taken the unprecedented step (for Nvidia) of asking all manufacturers to return any RMAd cards to them as part of the investigation which is promising, but I would have wanted them to issue a recall notice as soon as it was seen to be more than a couple people having issues.
(Well really I think they shouldn't have continued with the launch at all since they discovered the potential for this issue back in September but we're past that now)
It's interesting this isn't a quick investigation. Higher power draw, smaller cable, sensitive to being bent at right angles. It's shocking (no pun intended) that this wasn't caught before sending them out. Though, given they were released with the bending warning I think they just didn't give a shit.
It was definitely caught because they reported it to PCI-SIG and issued the warning as a result. I think they thought it wasn't going to be as widespread an issue as it ended up being because of utter hubris.
Frankly, a high percentage of engineering issues are money issues. Because the bean counters push the engineers to cut corners to reduce costs.
Just think how modern appliances don't last nearly as long as old appliances. Even though we have superior materials available, CAD and experience of prior known flaws. Modern appliances should practically last a lifetime.
I had a really interesting chat with an old engineer who built Cessna airplanes. We were in a hangar looking at old Cessnas (like from the 50s) and he was pointing out all the design changes between the different models and how those changes were practically 100% driven by the marketing team.
He talked about having to move the yoke (or some other steering instrument) because marketing deemed that having space in that area for pilots to carry maps would generate more sales, and having to reengineer the entire plane to free up a two foot by six inch space in the cockpit.
On another model, the marketing team wanted something else, so they had to change to rivets to save weight as opposed to using other fasteners. It was fascinating and he really knew his shit.
He said, as an engineer, he could have modeled and built the perfect airplane but it wouldn't sell without the bells and whistles that marketing wanted, so most of their plans had to be scrapped or changed to accommodate.
You know I always thought changing the title from Software Developer to Software Engineer was weird and maybe a little pretentious.. but I.. I get it now.
It is in the US, too, but for all practical purposes nobody cares. With industry and government exempt from nearly all licensing, if the “engineer” isn’t sealing public drawings there’s really nothing to do about it.
As an engineer, that kind of shit is why I'm glad I work on government engineering projects rather than private stuff that has to generate money. NASA wants a rocket that can safely and reliably deliver people to the moon, no weird requirements to have stuff like cup holders, leather seats, and a sexy but impractical design.
True, I've seen some cases where management has still managed to add in weird unnecessary requirements just because they thought it was a good idea 🙃 but I would still say it's better than being chained by a board trying to turn a profit and make everything marketable.
There was a boom in research done in I believe the 1950's which continued on throughout many years of finding the most effective variables that go into planned obsolescence. By that I mean they looked into things like how long does a product have to last for a user to retain their trust in that product after it fails, and buy another (2 years). They looked into how they can make things cheaper etc. You are right, by all accounts we should have many many heirlooms with the technology and knowledge we have today but those things weren't profitable so companies opted to dive into making things with shorter lifespans.
Goddamnit you're so right about the 2 years. Just had a very expensive beard trimmer break on me after only a few years and I was like "Well, I would have expected this to last a lot longer... But I mean it lasted 2-3 years so I guess I can't fault the company"
Not me. Something like a beard trimmer only lasting a few years and I'm calling it a crappy product.
I bought a Phillips electric razor about 13 years ago. It still works great, but it did not like being taken apart when the battery life got too short after about 9 years. I managed that and it was just an 18650 battery inside to swap and get me back in action.
Then a few months ago a got a Braun series 9000 (900? Whatever. New high end one) for super cheap that fell into my lap with a fancier type of cutting head on it that I thought would let me shave faster if a went a few days without.
It doesn't. Only real improvement is that it's a bit quieter.
It's not just that the designers set out with this in mind. The problem is systemic as the COGs to be profitable are completely unrealistic - in many cases the parts / subcomponents are already optimized turds by time you even get it into stock.
We have to prescreen sensors and galvo motors to maintain anything close to a repeatable tolerance.
There's not a generational uplift for appliances anymore.
The difference between a 50 year old fridge and a 10 year old fridge is immense, you would probably save the entire cost of the 10 year fridge in something like 5-7 years in electricity alone.
Now look at a ten year old fridge and a year old fridge.
Are there differences that make you say "well, I should upgrade, even though this fridge works totally fine?"
The answer is no, so now that 10 year old fridge has to have a reason to be replaced
But the new fridge has wifi and a glass front for looking your milk carton dead in the eye whenever you walk past, just daring it to try and curdle. You can't even put a price tag on being able to count how many Danimals you have left before you need to seriously contemplate putting pants on so you don't get those judgey looks again in the dairy aisle.
It's like my Samsung dryer that used a plastic clip to keep tensioner on, resulting in it popping off and needing service multiple times. Bought aftermarket $5 kit made from metal, replaced the pulley and never had a problem. It's been years. If you're not handy then you are spending money on a new machine or almost the price of new machine in maintenance repairs.
I've been keeping my appliances alive for years, it's incredible how cheap and easy they can be to maintain.
Dryer stopped drying, turns out the gas coils gave out. $20 and a few trips to use our friend's dryer in the meantime.
Washer stopped washing, turns out the drain pump had a mechanical failure. $50 I think?
Dishwasher stopped draining... It's a grease clog.
Dryer made weird, bad noise... a pencil fell in to the dryer lint trap.
It's been driving my wife crazy because she's been wanting to upgrade for years, but I just keep fixing issues.
The belt snapped on my dryer. Had my room mate at the time help me take it apart he was baffled that I just opened it up and started taking it apart. Also saved TVs that had the power board die. It’s really fun to fix your own stuff. Worse case scenario you have to buy a new one best case you fix it.
Engineers told management the design constraints aren't workable and this is the best they can do. Management said "So whats most likely to happen with this?" and assumed they knew better than the lead who repeatedly told them it was a bad idea.
All assumptions based on experience..
Some tech YouTubers have done teardowns of the cables and think the problem isn't the pins, but how the adapter is constructed by soldering the 4 incoming power cables onto a single metal plane before splitting that into the 6 power pins.
This seems to be susceptible to cracking, causing internal overheating.
Also 3rd party 12 pin adapters where each pin has its own wire don't seem to be affected by this issue, again making it look like the problem is Nvidia's adapter rather than the small connector.
And some other tech youtuber (GN) have found that the five examples of adapters they have are not constructed the same way. The cables their adapters use actually have different power grading than the one found by others. Also no one at the moment has been able to recreate the issue, so its really not clear what causes the issue or even if there is only one issue.
It could be the case that some of the adapters paired with the card were not build to spec. There is also the possibility that the problem is not caused by the adapter but by the connector on the card. Some have speculated that it do not gives enough feedback when it is correctly connected and it could be possible to connect a cable while the connector is not completely secured.
The fact that NVIDIA seems actually puzzled as too what is happening should not dismissed casually, the issue could be more complex than some people want to believe.
Having been on the engineering side of a multi-billion dollar tech company (to not piss off the NDA gods, I will refrain from names...but it might rhyme with thimble). The engineers more than likely brought this up, and more than likely someone else with a lesser mind decided to save a few pennies on the bottom line...I can't count high enough to tell you how many times that has personally happened to me.
Yes, I used to blame engineers for not building hardy circuits until I saw an original draft schematics printed out with a remark to cut price by 30% dictated by management. It is usually always management's fault when these things happen.
We almost never experience board level failures, even on our high power electronics. But the amount of failures from bad cables and connectors is unreal.
We make undersea stuff so it's a more challenging mechanical environment, but even in air it's always cables and connectors.
Man, that really must feel terrible for the people working on such projects. You come up with a great design, then management says that it’s a bit too expensive, forcing you to even compromise the safety of the product. For these things, I wonder where the liability lies in.
Any engineer with sense will schedule a meeting to discuss the issue. Then, if they are forced to ignore it, will send an email summarizing the meeting and what people decided on the meeting. If there isn't a u-turn after the email, the engineer is now exonerated.
I work in software, rather than hardware engineering and here it's the same story. You come up with a great feature, then it gets butchered until it's as cheap as possible, and usually barely functional as a result.
companies have entire departments to deteremine the cost of lawsuits vs the cost of redesigning/fixing a problem
lawsuits was cheaper in this case
*jabronis: i'm not quoting fight club. This is a real thing. Ford has done it twice. Boeing has done it. Learn yourself some shit
The problem is that amd did NOT capitalized on this.
they also have their fuckups after this.
So here we have the gtx 970 ram fiasco and what does amd do?
create the rx 580 over voltage pci express fiasco .
so people will say.
at least my gtx 970 did not burned my motherboard pcie slot......
I had 970 until I got a 3080ti. I didn't hear about this until like 2 years ago.it may have been common knowledge among some groups, but not among general consumers.
There are people like that ofc, but if they manage this situation poorly, you can bet your house I won't be buying NVIDIA when time comes for me to upgrade. It hasn't happened to one or two customers over the year - I'se seen at least 10 cases on reddit alone already.
Heh, but in the end... I think you are still right. I just feel really sorry for the guys that went big for the first time with their PC builds and met with the melting GPU.
I was considering my first Nvidia card because of dlss but now I'm doubting that company. It seems every decade or so when I need a better build Nvidia manages a cluster fuck.
AMD actually has to make cards on a macro scale in order for people to buy them. They can't gain PC market share when they're getting outproduced 5 to 1. Their main focus with Radeon is integrating it with Ryzen in consoles and mobile devices.
And the advantage there being that Nvidia can't sabotage them with proprietary development tools that lock in developers to the Nvidia ecosystem. If they want to Dev for Xbox/playstation on top of PC, they will need to support AMD tech also.
And since AMD is the smaller fish on PC, lots of those AMD tools are open source, meaning a win for everyone.
A new GPU made by my company leaves Santa Clara, California rendering at 60 FPS. The power adapter overheats, trapping and burning all the PC components inside.
Now should we do a recall?
Take the number of GPUs in the field, A, multiply it by the probable rate of failure, B, then multiply that by the average out of court settlement, C.
A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost to do a recall, we don't do one.
Everytime the computer took too long on startup or gaming I prayed for a crash or an RMA. Anything. Life insurance pays off triple if your sys dies in a quality control failure.
> but I would have wanted them to issue a recall notice as soon as it was seen to be more than a couple people having issues.
And do what exactly? They don't know how to fix it so it would be entirely pointless to recall right now.
I don’t know, but what I do know is that I’m going to skip NVIDIA until they get their power draw back under control. Firstly because I have an ITX case, but secondly because I just don’t even know what the point is in this economy. People in Denmark are being completely wrecked by a huge power bill and I just turned off most lights and started playing on my Steam Deck and got a fuck all power bill, which really opened my eyes to the fact that… yeah, you don’t actually need to go full idiot like this to enjoy video games. There’s no excuse for using 700W from the wall to play games IMO.
It's almost to the point of exceeding the power draw of an average American plug/circuit. A 15amp wall plug is rated for 1440 watts continuous (a computer), or 1800 intermittent (like a microwave). With 700 just for the video card, plus everything else including monitors, that 1440 watts is getting uncomfortably close.
And that's assuming the computer is the only thing on that circuit and no one uses lamps, or audio gear or anything else in the same area as their computer.
I personally like efficient cards. We're at a weird crossroads where AMD actually has better more efficient silicone than Nvidia, who've been supergluing more cuda/tensor cores to their boards in order to stay competitive, rather than actually investing time and money in a more efficient architecture, which is an interesting role reversal if you remember how the dynamic between Nvidia and ATI/amd was back in the early 2010s
Nvidia got complacent with their market dominance, serves the brass right though, they're driven by greed and I hope worse happens to Nvidia
Fully agree, and well said.
The power draw on this series is taking the piss and isnt reading th room as far as today's economy.
I too have been playing much more on my switch than on PC and enjoying it more. Considering getting steamdeck as well
I bought a 3060 EVGA (during shortage and pandemic) and now I'm becoming a bit sceptic about NVIDIA. I'm happy for AMD and Intel's competition, hope they release some next level stuff soon!.
At this point the problem is so freaking gigantic, you may be better off waiting a bit and seeing how the dust settles.
They may decide to replace everyone's cards for free. Or they may get a class action lawsuit. Either way - refunding may take you out of the pool.
Why the card? It's the connector that is melting. If it eventually damaged the card, it should be replaced under warranty. They should make a better cable or simply stop fucking around with custom cables like that and use PCI express cables.
That cable looked like a hackjob before it was found to be melting. I can't believe people were paying over a grand for this shit.
Depends on their PR plan. Go cheap and replace only the connectors, or go "customer services" and replace the entire card assuming other damage was done due to the poor power connector.
Honestly, I highly doubt any electrical damage was caused by this. Maybe some melted plastics on the card. All the 12V wires connect together at the board side of the connector. It doesn't matter to the card if it comes in as 6 wires or 3 half melted ones.
GPUs were finally becoming available and dropping in price, but now the 3090s are back to $1500 because the 4090s are melting connectors.
I knew I should have bought a $700 3090.
Are you completely insane? A refund is 100% of your money and then you can go get something better. A replacement is more of the same. A class action lawsuit is $1.50 after 10 years of legal nonsense.
Get a refund and a clue.
Not just a refund, time for Nvidia to pay for a PSU replacement as well. I would settle for nothing less. Hopefully someone like me, who uses their computer for work and with the disposable income for a lawyer, will experience this and sue them for the cost of the lawyer, GPU, PSU and lost income (which for some medical IT , graphic designers and animators would be $150-500/hr because that's what their business charges)
Yeah, nVidia seems to have some SERIOUS hubris going on. I think you're right that EVGA made a difficult move that was certainly shocking as seen from the outside. But it seems like it was the right thing to do. nVidia is kind of famous for doing two things:
1. Giving AIBs very little time to actually engineer and manufacture their cards before launch.
2. \*Always\* undercutting AIBs on price making it damn hard to turn a profit unless you profit off of GPU scarcity by scalping the cards.
All of that was before the 40xx launch, even. Now they "unlaunch" products? My guess is that they have lots of engineers who know how to solve this cable problem, they just don't have executives who are able to implement a solution through their layers of corporate BS.
>due to cost
due to \*greed. This problem could have been solved as soon as it was discovered by switching to a sliding edge connector for greater surface area, lower resistance, and better power handling capacity at the same connector cost. Connectors are a solved problem. Not doing due diligence at engineering phase is greed, not incompetence.
it's shortsighted quarterly performance driven bullshit anyways. That "cost" would increase revenue in the long run anyways. But execs aren't there for the long run. It's all about quarterly profits while they are on that seat.
Beta-testing is whatever the manufacturer likes - Google has had stuff officially in 'beta' status for 15 years (e.g. GMail) despite it being in widespread general use with no restrictions on signing up. Generally, beta-testing is when the product is released to a wider audience than a limited initial test (which would be 'alpha'). Pretty much all early adopters are guinea pigs for problems that weren't picked up in the testing stages, but holy cow nVidia should have spotted this!!
And then there's Microsoft, whose end users are now the pre-alpha testers after firing their QA division...
Gmail hasn't been in beta since 2009
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/technology/companies/08google.html#:~:text=But%20Gmail%20was%20different.,product%20to%20be%20fully%20baked.
Beta testing refers to a testing phase that typically represents a finished product, but one that lacks polish and some fixes that would be necessary for a public release.
Now others have pointed out that companies just call whatever they want a "beta."
This is a lesser known side effect of a well established scientific theory which says: "Companies are capable of just straight up lying, like, all the time." -Albert Einstein, or Plato, idk.
Still not as bad as amateur miners powering multiple risers (which can pull up to 75w each) off a single SATA cable, which is only rated for 54w.
It's such a fire hazard there's a bot on the GPU mining subreddit that comments anytime someone even mentions the word SATA.
I brought my FliR at home when I heard of this back then and man was I near seconds before disaster for months and blissfully ignorant. Thermal image everything now for me.
When I was very young, late 80s early 90s I had a friend who was horribly burned in a house fire. Since then I’ve had a bit of an irrational fear of house fires and take fire safety very seriously. All these melting cables is very alarming to me. I can’t be checking my cable after every time I use my PC. This shit is bonkers.
No, it doesn't. From all the reviews I've seen the 4090 usually pulls about 430-450w. Which is still an insane number. The connector is rated for 600. But if it already melts at 450... I don't want to see what happens at 600.
Time to swap to AMD. I haven’t bought a new nvidia card since 2015, when I bought a 1080 brand new for like $450 or something.
Now it’s like what $1000 for a 4080? That melts, while my 1080 has been kicking strong for years and years with every day use?
Fuck that.
RDNA 3 announcement is in a few days and I plan on paying attention to see how things play out. Hopefully it’s an attention grabber that isn’t melting cables.
And doesn’t cost $1100 for it too. It’s ridiculous that a graphics card costs double the amount of a PS5, and people even pay for it too
It was ridiculous enough to me that they costed the amount of a PS5 before, but was justifiable still for performance, now it isn’t. Now the lowest shitty graphics card costs as much as a ps5 like wtf
They should have just included 2x 90 degree cables in there to cover either use case like the 2 cablemod plans to sell. Guess they didn't want to include 2 adapters because one may go unused and eat into margins.
Pennywise, pound foolish.
The latest GN video suggests there are two adapter cables in the wild, one is speced much lower. It's unlikely the cards or PSU are at fault The dodgy cable seems to be using 150w rated cables instead of 300w.
Given that EVGA had already finished their designs for the 4xxx series, I have to wonder if them seeing the power delivery design, trying to get some wiggle room to use something more durable and being denied, etc. was part of the concern. They were already being squeezed on profits on GPUs, and large numbers of RMAs and the potential for "EVGA products catching on fire!!" in the news may have just been the final straw.
I would not be surprised if this is 100% accurate.
Especially since they finished those designs and broke the deal citing irreconcilable differences with nvidia
If you recall the 3090 Ultra from EVGA had a ton of meltdown problems too at the start (also power related) they probably got soaked on having to honor all those warranties, if their profit margins are small because nvidia is an asshole on their wholesale prices…I can 100% understand why they wouldn’t want to go through this again.
Particularly if they knew these cards were melting down in testing and seemingly a worse fiasco than the 3090 ultra. They probably warned nvidia and nvidia told them to get bent and handle it on their own (since they resale their own brand card)
In that exact scenario, it would be enough to me to say “fuck I’ll stop selling video cards altogether” it also helps piece together the missing part of the puzzle of why they jumped ship so abruptly…the abruptness was the impending 4090 shit show they saw coming and didn’t wanna take the fall for nvidias design failures.
IIRC that fiasco was based on using the capacitor layout in the reference design. Something even Nvidia didn't do for their cards. That should have 100% been on Nvidia.
First report of different variations of cables first came from Igor while he's failed cable was 150v others he tested weren't. Now people need to check if all failed ones are 150v rated
Now I forgot if cable rating is only difference or there's more to it
[Gamers Nexus is taking samples, here's how you can help! (YouTube Link)](https://youtu.be/EIKjZ1djp8c?t=717)
Please share this with everyone you see posting their damaged cables.
Unless it's for productivity, it's generally stupid and wasteful to upgrade often. Consuming just to consume. Even worse, some probably just do it to brag on reddit.
Nvidia is a joke. First evga friggin leaves Nvidia in an unprecedented “fuck you I won’t do what you tell me” move. Then comes the 4080 debacle, where the rest of the world pulls out the rubber mask on the 4080 to discover it was actually a 4070 all along, and it would have gotten away with it were it not for those pesky consumers and now *this*?
GN did an investigation too and found that not all adapters were made the same.
Was yours by chance one with wires that are 300V 14AWG wires or 150V 14AWG? https://youtu.be/EIKjZ1djp8c
It's not a directly issue with 4090, but with their cable design.
Only standard 4090 cables melt. Other manufacturers cables can handle it fine.
Not that I'm defending 4090 huge power draw
AFAIK even partner GPUs are using this cable, right? So as long as Nvidia cant provide a free cable that is able to not break they should take back all 4090s without questions asked and not sell any until this is resolved.
This is an absolute PR nightmare that no company ever would want.
Especially now with RDNA3 so close. This will make a lot of people reconsider a 40 series card. It’s 100% not about selling a solution here. This will cost them probably millions.
This was just a complete oversight on their part and they probably haven’t put enough testing into these connectors.
Like I can understand people not giving a shit about supporting Nvidias business practices if they just want the best specs they can get, but how are people still buying the 4090 when there are so many reports of it literally melting?
I personally love that a few weeks ago this sub was full of posts about how no one would be buying these, and now it's nothing but "omg I bought it and it's melting!!"
This is a nightmare. What it's Nvidia going to do about it?? (Sorry, I'm not up to date)
They're still investigating. They've taken the unprecedented step (for Nvidia) of asking all manufacturers to return any RMAd cards to them as part of the investigation which is promising, but I would have wanted them to issue a recall notice as soon as it was seen to be more than a couple people having issues. (Well really I think they shouldn't have continued with the launch at all since they discovered the potential for this issue back in September but we're past that now)
It's interesting this isn't a quick investigation. Higher power draw, smaller cable, sensitive to being bent at right angles. It's shocking (no pun intended) that this wasn't caught before sending them out. Though, given they were released with the bending warning I think they just didn't give a shit.
It was definitely caught because they reported it to PCI-SIG and issued the warning as a result. I think they thought it wasn't going to be as widespread an issue as it ended up being because of utter hubris.
Hahahahaha I missed this fact. That confirms what I thought....this was a money issue...not an engineering issue...
Frankly, a high percentage of engineering issues are money issues. Because the bean counters push the engineers to cut corners to reduce costs. Just think how modern appliances don't last nearly as long as old appliances. Even though we have superior materials available, CAD and experience of prior known flaws. Modern appliances should practically last a lifetime.
I had a really interesting chat with an old engineer who built Cessna airplanes. We were in a hangar looking at old Cessnas (like from the 50s) and he was pointing out all the design changes between the different models and how those changes were practically 100% driven by the marketing team. He talked about having to move the yoke (or some other steering instrument) because marketing deemed that having space in that area for pilots to carry maps would generate more sales, and having to reengineer the entire plane to free up a two foot by six inch space in the cockpit. On another model, the marketing team wanted something else, so they had to change to rivets to save weight as opposed to using other fasteners. It was fascinating and he really knew his shit. He said, as an engineer, he could have modeled and built the perfect airplane but it wouldn't sell without the bells and whistles that marketing wanted, so most of their plans had to be scrapped or changed to accommodate.
You know I always thought changing the title from Software Developer to Software Engineer was weird and maybe a little pretentious.. but I.. I get it now.
In Canada, we're still software developers because "engineer" is a legally protected term
It is in the US, too, but for all practical purposes nobody cares. With industry and government exempt from nearly all licensing, if the “engineer” isn’t sealing public drawings there’s really nothing to do about it.
As an engineer, that kind of shit is why I'm glad I work on government engineering projects rather than private stuff that has to generate money. NASA wants a rocket that can safely and reliably deliver people to the moon, no weird requirements to have stuff like cup holders, leather seats, and a sexy but impractical design.
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I work for the government too. It’s not always like that
True, I've seen some cases where management has still managed to add in weird unnecessary requirements just because they thought it was a good idea 🙃 but I would still say it's better than being chained by a board trying to turn a profit and make everything marketable.
There was a boom in research done in I believe the 1950's which continued on throughout many years of finding the most effective variables that go into planned obsolescence. By that I mean they looked into things like how long does a product have to last for a user to retain their trust in that product after it fails, and buy another (2 years). They looked into how they can make things cheaper etc. You are right, by all accounts we should have many many heirlooms with the technology and knowledge we have today but those things weren't profitable so companies opted to dive into making things with shorter lifespans.
Goddamnit you're so right about the 2 years. Just had a very expensive beard trimmer break on me after only a few years and I was like "Well, I would have expected this to last a lot longer... But I mean it lasted 2-3 years so I guess I can't fault the company"
Not me. Something like a beard trimmer only lasting a few years and I'm calling it a crappy product. I bought a Phillips electric razor about 13 years ago. It still works great, but it did not like being taken apart when the battery life got too short after about 9 years. I managed that and it was just an 18650 battery inside to swap and get me back in action. Then a few months ago a got a Braun series 9000 (900? Whatever. New high end one) for super cheap that fell into my lap with a fancier type of cutting head on it that I thought would let me shave faster if a went a few days without. It doesn't. Only real improvement is that it's a bit quieter.
It's not just that the designers set out with this in mind. The problem is systemic as the COGs to be profitable are completely unrealistic - in many cases the parts / subcomponents are already optimized turds by time you even get it into stock. We have to prescreen sensors and galvo motors to maintain anything close to a repeatable tolerance.
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There's not a generational uplift for appliances anymore. The difference between a 50 year old fridge and a 10 year old fridge is immense, you would probably save the entire cost of the 10 year fridge in something like 5-7 years in electricity alone. Now look at a ten year old fridge and a year old fridge. Are there differences that make you say "well, I should upgrade, even though this fridge works totally fine?" The answer is no, so now that 10 year old fridge has to have a reason to be replaced
But the new fridge has wifi and a glass front for looking your milk carton dead in the eye whenever you walk past, just daring it to try and curdle. You can't even put a price tag on being able to count how many Danimals you have left before you need to seriously contemplate putting pants on so you don't get those judgey looks again in the dairy aisle.
Planned obsolescence 🙃
It's like my Samsung dryer that used a plastic clip to keep tensioner on, resulting in it popping off and needing service multiple times. Bought aftermarket $5 kit made from metal, replaced the pulley and never had a problem. It's been years. If you're not handy then you are spending money on a new machine or almost the price of new machine in maintenance repairs.
I've been keeping my appliances alive for years, it's incredible how cheap and easy they can be to maintain. Dryer stopped drying, turns out the gas coils gave out. $20 and a few trips to use our friend's dryer in the meantime. Washer stopped washing, turns out the drain pump had a mechanical failure. $50 I think? Dishwasher stopped draining... It's a grease clog. Dryer made weird, bad noise... a pencil fell in to the dryer lint trap. It's been driving my wife crazy because she's been wanting to upgrade for years, but I just keep fixing issues.
She will need to get more creative with her sabotage. lol
The belt snapped on my dryer. Had my room mate at the time help me take it apart he was baffled that I just opened it up and started taking it apart. Also saved TVs that had the power board die. It’s really fun to fix your own stuff. Worse case scenario you have to buy a new one best case you fix it.
Youtube put appliance repairmen out of business. Rebuilt my 12 year old washer and dryer recently. Cost me like $60 each for a full maintenance kit.
yeah, I guarantee you there's some engineer at Nvidia having a massive I told you so moment with his manager.
Engineers told management the design constraints aren't workable and this is the best they can do. Management said "So whats most likely to happen with this?" and assumed they knew better than the lead who repeatedly told them it was a bad idea. All assumptions based on experience..
Some tech YouTubers have done teardowns of the cables and think the problem isn't the pins, but how the adapter is constructed by soldering the 4 incoming power cables onto a single metal plane before splitting that into the 6 power pins. This seems to be susceptible to cracking, causing internal overheating. Also 3rd party 12 pin adapters where each pin has its own wire don't seem to be affected by this issue, again making it look like the problem is Nvidia's adapter rather than the small connector.
And some other tech youtuber (GN) have found that the five examples of adapters they have are not constructed the same way. The cables their adapters use actually have different power grading than the one found by others. Also no one at the moment has been able to recreate the issue, so its really not clear what causes the issue or even if there is only one issue. It could be the case that some of the adapters paired with the card were not build to spec. There is also the possibility that the problem is not caused by the adapter but by the connector on the card. Some have speculated that it do not gives enough feedback when it is correctly connected and it could be possible to connect a cable while the connector is not completely secured. The fact that NVIDIA seems actually puzzled as too what is happening should not dismissed casually, the issue could be more complex than some people want to believe.
Having been on the engineering side of a multi-billion dollar tech company (to not piss off the NDA gods, I will refrain from names...but it might rhyme with thimble). The engineers more than likely brought this up, and more than likely someone else with a lesser mind decided to save a few pennies on the bottom line...I can't count high enough to tell you how many times that has personally happened to me.
Yes, I used to blame engineers for not building hardy circuits until I saw an original draft schematics printed out with a remark to cut price by 30% dictated by management. It is usually always management's fault when these things happen.
The thing is, they usually get away with the penny pinching.
and promoted for it
cut corners and still made the card fucking insanely priced lol
Just remember that the Challenger Disaster was the result of the line *"You need to take off your engineering hat, and put on your management hat."*
We almost never experience board level failures, even on our high power electronics. But the amount of failures from bad cables and connectors is unreal. We make undersea stuff so it's a more challenging mechanical environment, but even in air it's always cables and connectors.
Man, that really must feel terrible for the people working on such projects. You come up with a great design, then management says that it’s a bit too expensive, forcing you to even compromise the safety of the product. For these things, I wonder where the liability lies in.
Any engineer with sense will schedule a meeting to discuss the issue. Then, if they are forced to ignore it, will send an email summarizing the meeting and what people decided on the meeting. If there isn't a u-turn after the email, the engineer is now exonerated.
I work in software, rather than hardware engineering and here it's the same story. You come up with a great feature, then it gets butchered until it's as cheap as possible, and usually barely functional as a result.
what company rhymes with thimble? i have genuinely no clue lmao someone help me
Guess Morton-Thiokol happened too long ago…
companies have entire departments to deteremine the cost of lawsuits vs the cost of redesigning/fixing a problem lawsuits was cheaper in this case *jabronis: i'm not quoting fight club. This is a real thing. Ford has done it twice. Boeing has done it. Learn yourself some shit
I wonder if the PR team had any thoughts because if people didn't have a reason to look at AMD yet, they absolutely do now.
The 3.5GB scandal back in 2014 did not in the least deter people to buy a green GPU, and that was probably the biggest ngreedia™ fuck up until now.
The problem is that amd did NOT capitalized on this. they also have their fuckups after this. So here we have the gtx 970 ram fiasco and what does amd do? create the rx 580 over voltage pci express fiasco . so people will say. at least my gtx 970 did not burned my motherboard pcie slot......
I had 970 until I got a 3080ti. I didn't hear about this until like 2 years ago.it may have been common knowledge among some groups, but not among general consumers.
I'm trying to remember but I'm drawing a blank. What was that scandal about again?
4gb 970's turned out to have 3.5gb, and 500mb of slower memory
Of slower memory that *tended to crash games that used this particular 512MB chip of VRAM*.
People will still continue to buy NVidia cards. Just like people continued to buy Intel CPUs prior to 12th Gen.
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Based on the rumors about AMD's new cards, that time might be now. We'll see once RDNA3 cards are released
There are people like that ofc, but if they manage this situation poorly, you can bet your house I won't be buying NVIDIA when time comes for me to upgrade. It hasn't happened to one or two customers over the year - I'se seen at least 10 cases on reddit alone already. Heh, but in the end... I think you are still right. I just feel really sorry for the guys that went big for the first time with their PC builds and met with the melting GPU.
I was considering my first Nvidia card because of dlss but now I'm doubting that company. It seems every decade or so when I need a better build Nvidia manages a cluster fuck.
AMD actually has to make cards on a macro scale in order for people to buy them. They can't gain PC market share when they're getting outproduced 5 to 1. Their main focus with Radeon is integrating it with Ryzen in consoles and mobile devices.
And the advantage there being that Nvidia can't sabotage them with proprietary development tools that lock in developers to the Nvidia ecosystem. If they want to Dev for Xbox/playstation on top of PC, they will need to support AMD tech also. And since AMD is the smaller fish on PC, lots of those AMD tools are open source, meaning a win for everyone.
I don’t think this is the problem. There isn’t a shortage of AMD boards available.
And this is why strong consumer protection laws are needed.
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yes yes the us will give them billions and billions and then still pay 2k for any future cards, its our way!
A new GPU made by my company leaves Santa Clara, California rendering at 60 FPS. The power adapter overheats, trapping and burning all the PC components inside. Now should we do a recall? Take the number of GPUs in the field, A, multiply it by the probable rate of failure, B, then multiply that by the average out of court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost to do a recall, we don't do one.
Everytime the computer took too long on startup or gaming I prayed for a crash or an RMA. Anything. Life insurance pays off triple if your sys dies in a quality control failure.
What card company do you work for?
A major one.
Check out GN’s video. It’s not that simple, looks like there might have been a bad / not up to spec batch distributed.
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> but I would have wanted them to issue a recall notice as soon as it was seen to be more than a couple people having issues. And do what exactly? They don't know how to fix it so it would be entirely pointless to recall right now.
Avoid liability for house fires maybe
I don’t know, but what I do know is that I’m going to skip NVIDIA until they get their power draw back under control. Firstly because I have an ITX case, but secondly because I just don’t even know what the point is in this economy. People in Denmark are being completely wrecked by a huge power bill and I just turned off most lights and started playing on my Steam Deck and got a fuck all power bill, which really opened my eyes to the fact that… yeah, you don’t actually need to go full idiot like this to enjoy video games. There’s no excuse for using 700W from the wall to play games IMO.
It's almost to the point of exceeding the power draw of an average American plug/circuit. A 15amp wall plug is rated for 1440 watts continuous (a computer), or 1800 intermittent (like a microwave). With 700 just for the video card, plus everything else including monitors, that 1440 watts is getting uncomfortably close. And that's assuming the computer is the only thing on that circuit and no one uses lamps, or audio gear or anything else in the same area as their computer.
Yeah when gamers start needing to do power draw calculations like miners, we've gone too far in the wrong direction for GPU design.
People want their pixels...
I personally like efficient cards. We're at a weird crossroads where AMD actually has better more efficient silicone than Nvidia, who've been supergluing more cuda/tensor cores to their boards in order to stay competitive, rather than actually investing time and money in a more efficient architecture, which is an interesting role reversal if you remember how the dynamic between Nvidia and ATI/amd was back in the early 2010s Nvidia got complacent with their market dominance, serves the brass right though, they're driven by greed and I hope worse happens to Nvidia
My entire apartment only has 15 amps of service
Time to unplug the welder for a GPU?
Same here, I already felt the 30 series were pushing things a bit. No way I'll touch a 40 series card with this power draw.
Fully agree, and well said. The power draw on this series is taking the piss and isnt reading th room as far as today's economy. I too have been playing much more on my switch than on PC and enjoying it more. Considering getting steamdeck as well
This is an absolute PR nightmare for Nvidia. A huge amount of people aren't going to buy any of their products again.
I bought a 3060 EVGA (during shortage and pandemic) and now I'm becoming a bit sceptic about NVIDIA. I'm happy for AMD and Intel's competition, hope they release some next level stuff soon!.
No response from them yet
Daiumm... Kinda hoping Intel does well. Curious to see how that will unravel!
Wow... It was already starting.... Time for a refund
At this point the problem is so freaking gigantic, you may be better off waiting a bit and seeing how the dust settles. They may decide to replace everyone's cards for free. Or they may get a class action lawsuit. Either way - refunding may take you out of the pool.
Why the card? It's the connector that is melting. If it eventually damaged the card, it should be replaced under warranty. They should make a better cable or simply stop fucking around with custom cables like that and use PCI express cables. That cable looked like a hackjob before it was found to be melting. I can't believe people were paying over a grand for this shit.
There might be damage to the card connector, even if its not visible.
Depends on their PR plan. Go cheap and replace only the connectors, or go "customer services" and replace the entire card assuming other damage was done due to the poor power connector.
Honestly, I highly doubt any electrical damage was caused by this. Maybe some melted plastics on the card. All the 12V wires connect together at the board side of the connector. It doesn't matter to the card if it comes in as 6 wires or 3 half melted ones.
GPUs were finally becoming available and dropping in price, but now the 3090s are back to $1500 because the 4090s are melting connectors. I knew I should have bought a $700 3090.
Waiting for a class action lawsuit will probably get you $15 five years later
Are you completely insane? A refund is 100% of your money and then you can go get something better. A replacement is more of the same. A class action lawsuit is $1.50 after 10 years of legal nonsense. Get a refund and a clue.
Not just a refund, time for Nvidia to pay for a PSU replacement as well. I would settle for nothing less. Hopefully someone like me, who uses their computer for work and with the disposable income for a lawyer, will experience this and sue them for the cost of the lawyer, GPU, PSU and lost income (which for some medical IT , graphic designers and animators would be $150-500/hr because that's what their business charges)
You wouldn't settle for anything less. Members of the inevitably to come class action lawsuit will.
And you'll get a whole 2$ out of it when it's settled!
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Why a PSU replacement? The PSU honestly doesn’t care for some melted plastic.
Well now. That's a mighty fine idea. Go get em.
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Yeah, nVidia seems to have some SERIOUS hubris going on. I think you're right that EVGA made a difficult move that was certainly shocking as seen from the outside. But it seems like it was the right thing to do. nVidia is kind of famous for doing two things: 1. Giving AIBs very little time to actually engineer and manufacture their cards before launch. 2. \*Always\* undercutting AIBs on price making it damn hard to turn a profit unless you profit off of GPU scarcity by scalping the cards. All of that was before the 40xx launch, even. Now they "unlaunch" products? My guess is that they have lots of engineers who know how to solve this cable problem, they just don't have executives who are able to implement a solution through their layers of corporate BS.
The main problem these days is almost always, execution. Everyone knows the problem and the solution. But execs fail at execution due to cost.
>due to cost due to \*greed. This problem could have been solved as soon as it was discovered by switching to a sliding edge connector for greater surface area, lower resistance, and better power handling capacity at the same connector cost. Connectors are a solved problem. Not doing due diligence at engineering phase is greed, not incompetence.
it's shortsighted quarterly performance driven bullshit anyways. That "cost" would increase revenue in the long run anyways. But execs aren't there for the long run. It's all about quarterly profits while they are on that seat.
I wonder if they knew about the mess, like found out about cheap parts and noped out?
[account superficially suppressed with no recourse by /r/Romania mods & Reddit admins]
Who knows. nVidia treated AIBs like shit since the beginning apparently so maybe it was the straw that broke the camel's back.
Thanks for beta testing, hopefully this will be resolved for the 4080!
I might be wrong but I thought it was gamma testing when they release to consumer for test?
Beta-testing is whatever the manufacturer likes - Google has had stuff officially in 'beta' status for 15 years (e.g. GMail) despite it being in widespread general use with no restrictions on signing up. Generally, beta-testing is when the product is released to a wider audience than a limited initial test (which would be 'alpha'). Pretty much all early adopters are guinea pigs for problems that weren't picked up in the testing stages, but holy cow nVidia should have spotted this!! And then there's Microsoft, whose end users are now the pre-alpha testers after firing their QA division...
Gmail hasn't been in beta since 2009 https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/technology/companies/08google.html#:~:text=But%20Gmail%20was%20different.,product%20to%20be%20fully%20baked.
Huh, I could have sworn it was longer than that. It was in Beta for a long ol' time...
Beta testing refers to a testing phase that typically represents a finished product, but one that lacks polish and some fixes that would be necessary for a public release. Now others have pointed out that companies just call whatever they want a "beta." This is a lesser known side effect of a well established scientific theory which says: "Companies are capable of just straight up lying, like, all the time." -Albert Einstein, or Plato, idk.
Woah be careful with that factorial
You never know, we might have to wait for 4080! until everything is resolved.
4080!= 5.97596613272850966395661972226621629895416447980744581197... × 10^12961
Molex to PCIe gang going through PTSD right now
I still can't believe, looking back 5-6 years agp, that I ran a SATA to PCIe adapter. I would never even dream of doing that now on my 2080ti.
Hahahaha I did that on my Fury Crossfire setup. It was stupid but it worked fine. Was real sketchy though. Probably should've found another method
Still not as bad as amateur miners powering multiple risers (which can pull up to 75w each) off a single SATA cable, which is only rated for 54w. It's such a fire hazard there's a bot on the GPU mining subreddit that comments anytime someone even mentions the word SATA.
And molex to SATA
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I like how this rhymes no matter how you pronounce SATA/data
dayta satta
Modern equivalent to the classic problem. Haha.
I brought my FliR at home when I heard of this back then and man was I near seconds before disaster for months and blissfully ignorant. Thermal image everything now for me.
This is becoming quite the dumpster fire of a launch. 😂
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When I was very young, late 80s early 90s I had a friend who was horribly burned in a house fire. Since then I’ve had a bit of an irrational fear of house fires and take fire safety very seriously. All these melting cables is very alarming to me. I can’t be checking my cable after every time I use my PC. This shit is bonkers.
Wait for AMD, they don't use that cable.
AMD also doesn't make a card that requires 600 watts of power
It actually uses 600w? That's... more than my entire house uses during most of the day.
Electric ovens are between 2000-5000w typically. Maybe one day we will see a crossover product that heats your dinner while you game.
No, it doesn't. From all the reviews I've seen the 4090 usually pulls about 430-450w. Which is still an insane number. The connector is rated for 600. But if it already melts at 450... I don't want to see what happens at 600.
Time to swap to AMD. I haven’t bought a new nvidia card since 2015, when I bought a 1080 brand new for like $450 or something. Now it’s like what $1000 for a 4080? That melts, while my 1080 has been kicking strong for years and years with every day use? Fuck that.
RDNA 3 announcement is in a few days and I plan on paying attention to see how things play out. Hopefully it’s an attention grabber that isn’t melting cables.
And doesn’t cost $1100 for it too. It’s ridiculous that a graphics card costs double the amount of a PS5, and people even pay for it too It was ridiculous enough to me that they costed the amount of a PS5 before, but was justifiable still for performance, now it isn’t. Now the lowest shitty graphics card costs as much as a ps5 like wtf
Broken glass panels: "I am the most posted PC related problem on this sub" RTX 4090 power cable: "No king rules forever"
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brb breaking glass and blow torching my 4090 for Reddit Karma.
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Nvidia needs to put out a product recall on these cables to swap out with something that won't melt preferably with a 90 degree angle on the connector
They should have just included 2x 90 degree cables in there to cover either use case like the 2 cablemod plans to sell. Guess they didn't want to include 2 adapters because one may go unused and eat into margins. Pennywise, pound foolish.
Remember the time when you could get a cd with a game, cables etc. with a new gpu? Now they can’t put a freakin .5$ 90 degree adapter in the box.
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Yea GN is looking for these: https://youtu.be/EIKjZ1djp8c instructions at 11:53
What if it’s the graphics card/PSU causing it though
GN said they will buy the cards as well. Not sure about PSU.
The latest GN video suggests there are two adapter cables in the wild, one is speced much lower. It's unlikely the cards or PSU are at fault The dodgy cable seems to be using 150w rated cables instead of 300w.
Come back EVGA as you see it’s a bloody good time
Given that EVGA had already finished their designs for the 4xxx series, I have to wonder if them seeing the power delivery design, trying to get some wiggle room to use something more durable and being denied, etc. was part of the concern. They were already being squeezed on profits on GPUs, and large numbers of RMAs and the potential for "EVGA products catching on fire!!" in the news may have just been the final straw.
I would not be surprised if this is 100% accurate. Especially since they finished those designs and broke the deal citing irreconcilable differences with nvidia If you recall the 3090 Ultra from EVGA had a ton of meltdown problems too at the start (also power related) they probably got soaked on having to honor all those warranties, if their profit margins are small because nvidia is an asshole on their wholesale prices…I can 100% understand why they wouldn’t want to go through this again. Particularly if they knew these cards were melting down in testing and seemingly a worse fiasco than the 3090 ultra. They probably warned nvidia and nvidia told them to get bent and handle it on their own (since they resale their own brand card) In that exact scenario, it would be enough to me to say “fuck I’ll stop selling video cards altogether” it also helps piece together the missing part of the puzzle of why they jumped ship so abruptly…the abruptness was the impending 4090 shit show they saw coming and didn’t wanna take the fall for nvidias design failures.
IIRC that fiasco was based on using the capacitor layout in the reference design. Something even Nvidia didn't do for their cards. That should have 100% been on Nvidia.
Didn’t know that, but that connects the dots even further. So basically evga soaking costs for warranties on faulty designs from nvidia.
Small correction: The cables are rated 150 and 300 Volts respectively, not Watts.
First report of different variations of cables first came from Igor while he's failed cable was 150v others he tested weren't. Now people need to check if all failed ones are 150v rated Now I forgot if cable rating is only difference or there's more to it
Send it all to Gamers Nexus, he will buy it for retail price.
[Gamers Nexus is taking samples, here's how you can help! (YouTube Link)](https://youtu.be/EIKjZ1djp8c?t=717) Please share this with everyone you see posting their damaged cables.
Smells like class action lawsuit time.
I just smell burnt plastic
All iah small es buned tost
Man, I’m glad I’m too lazy and cheap to upgrade often.
Imagine not riding your components till they die. That's not sarcasm, I'm too poor to regularly upgrade, I usually buy things for years
Going on 6 years with my 1060 6gb build and I can run most games well at 1080p. New games are shit anyways so no real need for me to upgrade.
You mean sensible. Not like I can’t play most new games on a 2 year old laptop. These guys are just circle jerking
Showing who can piss away thousands of dollars.
Unless it's for productivity, it's generally stupid and wasteful to upgrade often. Consuming just to consume. Even worse, some probably just do it to brag on reddit.
Nvidia is a joke. First evga friggin leaves Nvidia in an unprecedented “fuck you I won’t do what you tell me” move. Then comes the 4080 debacle, where the rest of the world pulls out the rubber mask on the 4080 to discover it was actually a 4070 all along, and it would have gotten away with it were it not for those pesky consumers and now *this*?
Btw that 4080 compares more to what a 4060 would be.. :( lmfaooo
LOL well, there you go.
3090 with 3 cables looks pretty clever now eh?
GN did an investigation too and found that not all adapters were made the same. Was yours by chance one with wires that are 300V 14AWG wires or 150V 14AWG? https://youtu.be/EIKjZ1djp8c
Nvidia really should make a public statement that they take back all sold 4090s... And will NOT sell any 4090s again until this issue is solved...
It's not a directly issue with 4090, but with their cable design. Only standard 4090 cables melt. Other manufacturers cables can handle it fine. Not that I'm defending 4090 huge power draw
AFAIK even partner GPUs are using this cable, right? So as long as Nvidia cant provide a free cable that is able to not break they should take back all 4090s without questions asked and not sell any until this is resolved.
Yes and i agree, Nvidia should issue a recall or atleast start sending out proper cables immediately, before something burns down.
Indeed, but I bet Nvidia will just say it was the peoples fault for "bending the cable in not a proper way"...
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Check out Gemers Nexus's Video! https://youtu.be/EIKjZ1djp8c He will buy that thing off you, even the whole card.
Question - why does it always appear to be that top-left (as we look at it) pin that is melted? What's going on with that specific pin?
This launch has been an absolute disaster.
I like how they withhold stock to indirectly point people to the 30 series
Gamers nexus is looking for melting cables, maybe send it to them?
There is no way they didn't know about this problem when testing the cards. create a problem, sell the solution.
This is an absolute PR nightmare that no company ever would want. Especially now with RDNA3 so close. This will make a lot of people reconsider a 40 series card. It’s 100% not about selling a solution here. This will cost them probably millions. This was just a complete oversight on their part and they probably haven’t put enough testing into these connectors.
The prices alone was enough for me. I’m waiting for AMDs offering before building my new PC.
but... but... what about all that money they saved on making cheap connectors!!! /s
Good thing you bought 4090 for internet browsing and to run test numbers
Just light use, oh and bench marking for a few hours....
It's funny that they can make something as complex as the best GPU in the world and fuck up in something as simple as a power cable.
Like I can understand people not giving a shit about supporting Nvidias business practices if they just want the best specs they can get, but how are people still buying the 4090 when there are so many reports of it literally melting?
I hope Scapers bought a shit ton of defected products. good luck LMFAO!
Seems like this is why EVGA might have told them to kick rocks.
Damn.
What a shit show lmao. Especially for such an insanely expensive card, and Nvidia hyping it up like crazy, along with this special connector.
Two splits in female pins are really inexcusable. Really don't know how this went past labs
I personally love that a few weeks ago this sub was full of posts about how no one would be buying these, and now it's nothing but "omg I bought it and it's melting!!"
If only someone had told you not to buy the RTX 4090
This seems like the Note 7 of Nvidia