The story so far : NVIDIA launched its new RTX 4090 graphic card in October. At the time of launch, the company said the new graphics card would bring enormous leap in performance, efficiency, and AI-powered graphics. It even assured to deliver ultimate experience for gamers and creators through the newly launched product. But within a month of launch, users started complaining about overheating and melting issues with the graphic card’s 12-volt high-power (12VHPWR) power cable.
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In response to consumer complaints, the company said improper plugging of the connectors could have led to the issue. Tech watchdog GamersNexus initially supported the company’s argument. Now, The Peripheral Component Interconnect Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) noted that NVIDIA and its partners should have been more responsible and take proper safety measures to prevent such product-specific issues. The PCI-SIG standards body is responsible for developing and maintaining the standardised approach to peripheral component I/O data transfers.
What is the issue that users are complaining about?
Users of NVIDIA’s RTX 4090 graphics card experienced issues with the power cable plugs that go into the card. They complained that the connector on the cable or the socket on the card started to melt after use.
One of the users from the U.S. filed a lawsuit in the California district court against the company for marketing and selling a defective and dangerous power cable plug and socket, which posed a serious electrical and fire hazard.
The RTX 4090’s power draw is so great that it uses a newer 16-pin power connection. The product was designed to draw 450 watts during normal use and up to 600 watts when overclocked. All that power means increased wattage and heat flowing through each of the 16 pins. If there is even a temporary break in the electrical connection for any of the pins, too high a current will flow through the remaining pins, causing a meltdown, according to the lawsuit.
A meltdown poses a serious electrical and fire hazard, the user complained in the lawsuit. During active use like playing a game, the RTX 4090 consumes more power than every other component in a traditional desktop computer combined, including the CPU, RAM, hard drive, and cooling fans, he further stated in his complaint.
The user also questioned the pricing of the product. Users have been hit with a costly double-whammy: a premium purchase price of $1,599 as suggested by the manufacturer, for a dangerous product that should not have been sold in its current state, he stated in the lawsuit.
What is the importance of a graphics card?
A graphics card is a specialised piece of computer hardware designed to interface with a computer’s other components to accelerate the creation of images, which are then displayed on a monitor or other display device.
Stand-alone graphics cards like the RTX 4090 can render graphical output substantially faster than a computer’s general-purpose central processing unit (CPU) and random-access memory (RAM). Thus, users can increase system performance by offloading these tasks to a graphics card, rather than processing graphics directly from their CPU and RAM.
Modern graphics cards like the RTX 4090 support a host of advanced graphical features for 3D applications that would not otherwise be feasible at acceptable frame rates using the CPU and RAM alone.
The importance of graphics cards in the consumer electronics space has grown over time with a rise in the video game market. A dedicated graphics card is more or less required to render modern games. As more visually impressive games are released, more powerful graphics cards are required to render them. This has caused graphics cards to grow exponentially in computational power.
However, this growth comes at a cost. Today’s graphics cards consume massive amounts of power as compared to the ones just a few years ago.
What is NVIDIA saying?
NVIDIA acknowledged the issue and said that they are aware of about 50 such cases globally.
The California-based company also ensured that they are actively investigating the cases. However, they held the users responsible for loosely plugging the connectors into the graphics card.
“Our findings to date suggest that a common issue is that connectors are not fully plugged into the graphics card. To help ensure the connector is secure we recommend plugging the power dongle into the graphics card first to ensure it’s firmly and evenly plugged in, before plugging the graphics card into the motherboard,” NVIDIA said in its customer support page last month.
What is the PCI-SIG community saying?
The PCI-SIG group includes companies like Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Arm, IBM, Qualcomm, and others. It is holding Nvidia and its partners responsible for the issue.
GPU manufacturers need to take all appropriate measures to ensure user safety, including testing for the reported problem cases, PCI-SIG said in a statement.
PCI-SIG also reminded that its specifications provide necessary technical information for interoperability and do not attempt to address proper design, manufacturing methods, materials, safety testing, safety tolerances or workmanship. Members of the standards body are rather responsible for these issues.
