Friday, June 16th 2023
be quiet! Dark Power PSU Owner Reports Melting of 12VHPWR Connector
A member of the amusingly named and low populated r/4090Burning subreddit has reported a strange incident where the PSU side of his 12VHPWR connector had melted. Shiftyeyes67k shared his equipment's plight two days ago and included two photos with his story: "Started noticing a smell coming from my PSU (be quiet! Dark Power 13 1000 W) recently that smelled like burnt plastic. Decided to swap it out and noticed that the 12VHPWR cable was burned...From everything I've read this generally happens to the connector on the GPU side so I'm wondering if anyone has seen this yet?" His feedback shows that the relatively new connection standard has ongoing reliability issues, even though most 16-pin connector problem cases have affected beastly GPUs such as NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4090.
The be quiet! Dark Power 13 1000 W PSU has native support for the 16-pin cable standard, and no type of adapter was used in Shiftyeyes67k's example. Tom's Hardware reported on this sole incident recently, and a be quiet! representative responded to the article's content (updated today): "This is a unique case and we already have reached out to the customer to learn more." The company statement continues: "As our brand is known for highest quality standards, we treat this seriously and have initiated an investigation." be quiet! recommends that any customers experiencing similar issues should contact their support team directly. Tom's Hardware has attempted to get a comment from NVIDIA about the latest problem, but "an Nvidia spokesperson said we may not hear back for a few days due to a company closure."The article's author, Aaron Klotz, signs off with this reckoning: "This issue couldn't have come at a worse time with more RTX 4090 16-pin connector melting reports still coming in. NVIDIA claims that all of the 16-pin issues are related to user error, with the connector not being seated properly. But it's hard to believe that all of the errors were due to user error since some of these latest reports come from people who claim to be veteran system builders. Hopefully, this power supply issue with the 16-pin power connector does not extend to more users. But if it does, this could become an even more serious problem for the graphics card and power supply industries."
The be quiet! Dark Power 13 1000 W PSU has native support for the 16-pin cable standard, and no type of adapter was used in Shiftyeyes67k's example. Tom's Hardware reported on this sole incident recently, and a be quiet! representative responded to the article's content (updated today): "This is a unique case and we already have reached out to the customer to learn more." The company statement continues: "As our brand is known for highest quality standards, we treat this seriously and have initiated an investigation." be quiet! recommends that any customers experiencing similar issues should contact their support team directly. Tom's Hardware has attempted to get a comment from NVIDIA about the latest problem, but "an Nvidia spokesperson said we may not hear back for a few days due to a company closure."The article's author, Aaron Klotz, signs off with this reckoning: "This issue couldn't have come at a worse time with more RTX 4090 16-pin connector melting reports still coming in. NVIDIA claims that all of the 16-pin issues are related to user error, with the connector not being seated properly. But it's hard to believe that all of the errors were due to user error since some of these latest reports come from people who claim to be veteran system builders. Hopefully, this power supply issue with the 16-pin power connector does not extend to more users. But if it does, this could become an even more serious problem for the graphics card and power supply industries."