Nvidia Stealthily Changed the Power Connector Design on New GPUs

Ever since "melt gate" transpired after the RTX 4090 launch in late 2022, the industry has been waiting to see if there would ever be a second version of the 12VHPWR adapter. People were inserting the GPU's power cable and thinking it was secure. But in rare cases, it was not, which led to melted adapters and power connectors. It never made sense that the GPU would still function in this state, but regardless it was a known issue with no remedy other than "push the cable in really hard." Now it seems that Nvidia has been working on a solution and has already implemented it in new GPUs—without telling anyone.

According to a new report from Igor's Lab, the company has silently moved the sense pins back almost 2mm on some new GPUs. This new design started with the RTX 4070, which launched in April of this year. With the pins nudged backward just a bit, the cable must be inserted a tad bit more for a secure connection. Igor states this is installed on the RTX 4070 and possibly newer GPUs, which include the RTX 4060 Ti and 4060. It is described as a "1.7mm inward offset" and is visible in the comparison between the earlier RTX 4080 and RTX 4070 below.

Red boxes are our own, in order to show the new 1.7mm "inward offset" of the sense pins on an RTX 4070. Credit: Igor's Lab

What's notable about this discovery isn't just the stealthy way in which it's been implemented, as nobody seemed to notice until now, but that it also appears to be included on Nvidia-branded Founders Edition cards and those from its add-in board (AIB) partners. Igor shows it's been added to RTX 4070 cards from MSI, meaning Nvidia shared this information with its partners. This updated "offset" design was recently announced for ATX 3.1 power connectors, but the relevant organizations involved haven't officially ratified the spec yet. It appears Nvidia didn't want to wait for that to happen and decided to implement it anyway.

Thus far, we have yet to hear about any issues, so Nvidia's daring gambit may have paid off. It's also possible that if Nvidia had announced it was using a new connector, people would have become spooked, given what transpired previously. Regardless, it's odd that Nvidia would introduce a new connector that's not officially certified yet without telling anyone about it.

For now, we will have to wait and see if this new connector filters up to the beefier GPUs, which were the ones initially affected by the issue. For its part, Gigabyte has taken action on one of its RTX 4090 GPUs by moving the connector into the card more to prevent cable flex and to allow for additional cooling around the connection. We've yet to see other RTX 4090 manufacturers introduce similar changes with the hopes of avoiding cable meltdowns. It's not much of an issue now that the root cause has been discovered to be user error. But Nvidia's connector design still shoulders some of the blame—which is likely why it introduced this new version silently, as it probably didn't want to draw attention to the matter.