Two users posted photos of their GeForce RTX 4090 freezing due to melting of the 16-pin power connector. Each of the cards comes from a different manufacturer, in the first case it was a Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4090 Gaming OC model, in the second an ASUS GeForce RTX 4090 TUF Gaming OC.
However, the source of the problem will not be related to the manufacturer, but to the power connector. It became clear that already during the preparation of the standard, Nvidia solved the faults related to overheating with the PCI SIG (“faults have been observed …”, “thermal variance problem”) in the connector area.
The cause was found to be the bending of the cable in the first 30mm behind the connector and it was recommended not to bend the cables in the first 30mm behind the connector (some manufacturers have extended it to 35 or 40mm). Otherwise, there is a risk of bad contact in the connector, which overheats and melts or catches fire, as noted by the users mentioned.
From the user’s point of view, however, it can be difficult to follow the recommendation, as the boards are very large and finding room for another 30-40mm of straight cable routing + subsequent folding space is not easy. For this reason, some manufacturers are preparing right angle adapters that will allow you to adjust the routing of cables without the need to bend in the connector area. Something like this (in slightly oversized form) has already been published by EVGA in relation to the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti:
Therefore, it remains to recommend greater caution when installing the GeForce RTX 4090 and maximum effort to avoid bending the 16-pin cable in the first few inches from the connector.
Buildzoid / Indeed Hardcore Overclocking looked into the issue more thoroughly on their YouTube channel.
