Repair Shop Claims To Fix Up To 100 Fried RTX 4090 Cards Every Month
The GeForce RTX 4090 remains the king of the hill in the consumer GPU realm and it will stay that way until NVIDIA gets around to launching its next-gen Blackwell lineup, which will presumably include a GeForce RTX 5090. Not without its warts, however, the RTX 4090 is a pricey card (nothing unusual about that) and is apparently still prone to a well chronicled melting issue (which is unusual) affecting the PCIe power connector.
We can't say exactly how prominent the issue is, but according to NorthbridgeFix, an electronics repair shop in California with a presence on YouTube, GeForce RTX 4090 cards with melted connectors are still arriving in droves. In a newly posted video, Alex, a repair technician with some serious soldering skills, walks viewers through a repair of a burned connector.
At the beginning of the video, which is titled "4090 Graphics Cards Are Still A Problem," Alex makes a startling claim—he says the repair shop still receives RTX 4090 cards with melted connectors on a daily basis, and as many as 100 each month.
"Just a quick update on 4090s, connectors are still melting. We are still getting about 20 cards a week. When was the first time I worked on a 4090 card? The first 4090 card I worked on was January 2023. We still get those cards every single day. I would say about 20 cards a week, 80 to 100 cards a month," Alex says.
Unfortunately, there's no clarification on how many of those are the result of user error. While it's still concerning that something like this could happen, especially on a premium product with a price tag to match, RTX 4090 owners (and all graphics card owners, really) should ensure that the PCIe power cable is plugged all the way in for a snug fit.
In the latest video, however, Alex suggests that users are not to blame for the ongoing issues that he's seeing in the repair shop.
"In case you do not know about the problem or you have not been following, that's what's happening with 4090s connectors," Alex says while holding a burned power connector close to the camera. "They are melting, they're burning. You pay $2,000 for the card, you use it like you should, and the connector still melts."
This was the main reason why CableMod released (and later revised) angled GPU 12VHPWR adapters, though it ended up issuing a recall over a fire hazard. According to a notice by the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), there were 272 reports of adapters becoming loose and melting into the GPU, with at least $74,500 in property damage.
Hopefully you don't run into this issue yourself if you own a GeForce RTX 4090 (and for what it's worth, we haven't), but if you do, it's nice to know there's an experienced repair shop with plenty of experience fixing this very thing.
