This Torched GeForce RTX 4070 Is A Horrific Caution Over PSU Selection

If there's one piece of advice that's unanimous amongst PC builders of all stripes worldwide, it's to never, ever, skimp on your power supply (PSU)—no matter how much your second cousin says his dollar store special unit is doing fine. This point was quite clearly illustrated by a poor miner who saw their innocent Palit GeForce RTX 4070 go up in flames.

Patryk from the Youtube repair channel DIY Repair Hour performed a post-mortem on the card, immediately pointing out that the fire started on the 12V power connector. In theory, this situation is easily prevented with a system shutdown, thanks to the PSU's overcurrent protection (OCP) feature triggering. The only problem was, the PSU in question somehow didn't have that, or it was somehow faulty.

The card was in use in a mining rig, and the owner only became aware of the issue thanks to the distinct fragrance of Chanel No. 4070 wafting through the air. The fire was reportedly so intense that that pretty much nothing remained of the power connector. The situation is particularly bizarre as OCP has been a part of the ATX standard since the 2.2 revision in 2005, and most mid-range power supplies since the late 90s had it anyway. However, Patryk himself stated he's aware that some mining PSUs don't carry this feature.


You can check out the sad video here. The owner had sent the card to DIY Repair Hub to have components salvaged, and incredibly enough, according to Patryk's measurements, the GPU die should actually be OK, as well as some memory chips and a few assorted components—quite the unexpected haul from a card cosplaying as Anakin Skywalker.

Some readers could be wondering if Nvidia's famous 16-pin power connector was an issue here. According to our internet sleuthing, though, Palit 4070s require just the one standard 8-pin PCIe power connector; only the 4070 Super models use a 16-pin power plug. Regardless, the PSU ought to have shut down immediately when the overcurrent event started.