NVIDIA has seemingly started shipping its GeForce RTX 40 GPUs including the flagship RTX 4090 with the latest 16-Pin power connectors.
NVIDIA Equips GeForce RTX 40 GPUs With New & Improved 16-Pin Connector, RTX 4090 FE With New Spec Pictured
NVIDIA and its AIBs already shipped the mainstream GeForce RTX 4070 and RTX 4060 Ti graphics cards with the new 16-Pin connectors and it looks like the first GeForce RTX 4090 and higher-end cards are now also shipping with this new and updated design.
A Redditor on the NVIDIA subreddit, prackprackprack, has shown that his recently purchased RTX 4090 Founders Edition graphics card features a newer 16-pin connector. This can be confirmed by looking at the 4 additional Sense Pins which are shorter compared to our sample provided by the company during the launch. This new and improved design is part of the upcoming 12V-2×6 power connector which will lead to better power delivery but this design should help mitigate the power burn-ups and melting issues faced by several users.
The shortened sense pins allow the card to restrict any power coming from the PSU to the GPU if the cable isn’t fully inserted into the slot. In the previous design, if the 16-pin adapter or cable was not fully inserted, that would lead to irregular load balance among the pins, leading to really high temperatures and eventual melts.
So far, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 has been the most affected graphics card by the 16-pin connector melting issues. It is likely that the combination of the older connector, user error, and higher wattage drawn by the graphics card has led to these issues.
Users who already have the cards are unlikely to get a replacement with the newer 16-pin connectors so they are still at the risk of burning up their cards since we just recently saw several reports of Cablemod’s 90-degree power connectors burning up both the connector and GPU side. Since the RTX 4090 FE is getting the new design, we can also expect the same changes to be applied to NVIDIA’s RTX 4080 and RTX 4070 Ti GPUs too.