Nvidia are pretty sure the RTX 50 series GPUs won’t melt like the RTX 4090 did

rockpapershotgun.com:

Some eager beavers who bought the GeForce RTX 4090 at launch were, quite infamously, rewarded for their investment with a defective power adapter, one that that could melt the plastic in their £1679 graphics card like it was Ronald Lacey’s face. Nvidia reckon that won’t be an issue with for the imminent RTX 5090 and RTX 5080, though, even with the former’s drastically increased 575W power limit.

As reported by South Korean site Quasar Zone (and machine-translated by Tom’s Hardware), Nvidia execs fielded an audience question at an AI-focused RTX in Seoul, asking whether the new GPUs had fixed the singeing issue. "I don't expect that to happen with the RTX 50 series," came the response (Quasar Zone doesn’t name the speaker). "We made some changes to the connectors to address the issue at the time, and I understand that the issue has not occurred in about two years."

Mystery Graphics Man is referring to a redesigned power adapter that replaced the original, melty one not long after its destructive tendencies became widely known. Sure enough, this led to reports of incinerated RTX 4090s largely drying up, and while many of the defective cables did remain in the wild – and have still been causing trouble in more recent times – the fix obviously predates the RTX 50 series. Hence, Nvidia’s confidence that their top-spec cards won’t melt down again.

I’ve spent much of this week playing with an RTX 5090 for a very imminent review, and for what it’s worth... actually, does this violate the embargo? If I say something didn’t catch fire? Is that bad form? Nah screw it, mine hasn’t caught fire. But then, neither did my RTX 4090 review unit, so maybe I’m just lucky. Hopefully that luck will hold as Nvidia’s NDA enforcement team tactically breach my flat with flashbang grenades.

Less encouraging for the RTX 50 series’ launch, scheduled for January 30th, are a growing number of warnings over available stock levels. PowerGPU, a US-based seller of prebuilt gaming PCs, Xeeted that the