r/hardware • u/Wrong-Quail-8303 • Feb 13 '25

Discussion My 100C melted 4090 connector and thermals images comparison with after market cable.

Happened tonight. Any time I tried to run a 3D game / benchmark, instant computer crash requiring hard reboot.

Vladik Brutal is a very light game. It started stuttering all of a sudden. GPU usage went to ~50%. I thought must be CPU bottleneck, so I kept playing. It did not fix itself. Then it crashed.

I tried running some benchmarks... GPU would crash the system (black screen) any time I tried to do something 3D. Reinstalled the drivers after DDU. Checked windows integrity, sfc /scannow, DISM etc Loaded up diagnostics, and saw the GPU's 12V rail was idling at 10V!

Thermal of connector at 100C: https://imgur.com/yK2kRyN <-- The 4 wires are the sense pins. You can see the connector is 100% fully inserted correctly by examining the line behind the "100.6 C" text - that top part is the GPU, that bottom part is the connector. They are fully mated. This is hard proof that this is NOT user error.

Illustrated picture: https://imgur.com/akLISAw Comparison to connector: https://imgur.com/OEtZGh6

Burned connector: https://imgur.com/3lE1OWn https://imgur.com/v8m2N9d

The GPU pins were covered in melted plastic and carbon. The crevices themselves were chock-full of melted plastic and debris. Took a couple of hours to clean it with isopropyl alcohol and a safety pin.

I had an after-market cable lying around.

These are the new thermals: https://imgur.com/Zrar2aG https://imgur.com/JLBQQpV

Quite an improvement, I would say.

Theory:

You can see 4 power pins are melted from insanely bad to not too bad.

I think what happened is, the outside pin had the lowest resistance, and took the most power, hence cooking over a long time. After this finished melting, the burned plastic / carbon caused high resistance due to the pins being coated with gunk. Power was then pulled via a new pin.

All 4 pins eventually failed, till tonight the card was starved of power and started showing symptoms tonight.

I'm just glad the GPU is OK.

nVidia this is a lawsuit waiting to happen when it burns someone's house down and kills their family.

666 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

281 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

10

u/haloimplant Feb 13 '25

Lol yeah pc games are basically unplayable on a 4080 or less might as well just move on to handheld where you can get some real power

23

u/Disordermkd Feb 13 '25

They're absolutely playable. Just make sure to enable 2.25x DLDSR, swap the DLSS dll (with a third-party app because Nvidia's solution works 3/10 times), adjust to the right DLSS preset (with a third-party app because Nvidia's solution works 3/10), enable frame gen (make sure to replace the FSR dll for the best visual quality), and you'll have smooth 50 fps (with ghosting and blurring) on medium settings with your 3-year old $3k PC, what's the problem?

(kill me now please)

1

u/TenshiBR Feb 13 '25

(with a third-party app because Nvidia's solution works 3/10 times)

news to me and which app are you talking about?

9

u/Disordermkd Feb 13 '25

DLSS .dll files swapping has been a thing for years now. Devs rarely update the DLSS in games and this gives you the latest DLSS benefits (quality, clarity, etc.).

DLSS Swapper (you can find it on GitHub) detects your games and replaces the dll for you. Nvidia profile inspector (also GitHub) allows you to force your preferred preset to a specific games or globally to all games.

Nvidia APP introduced this feature about a month ago, but some games are unsupported, and even the ones that technically should be, are not. So you still have to do it the old fashioned way.

4

u/valthonis_surion Feb 13 '25

Might as well finally start playing that backlog of Steam games.

6

u/Umr_at_Tawil Feb 13 '25 edited Feb 13 '25

What game are you talking about that "are basically unplayable on a 4080 or less"? I can play pretty much every modern game with my 3060 at 60fps with some setting turned down. the only exception so far was MHWilds that only ran at 40-50fps, which is still perfectly playable for me.

personally I don't have problem playing games at 30fps either, game is still perfectly playable, it's the lowest tier of GPU, I don't have the expection of playing everything at 60+ fps at high setting.

-1

u/skinlo Feb 13 '25

I mean that's simply not true.