Another day, another case of an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 losing its will to live and committing seppuku via 12VHPWR burnout. For one owner, that damage was mitigated through the help of an unlikely fire alarm system: their cat.
According to a post on the Taiwanese PTT forums, the owner said that they were in the toilet when their cat started meowing. This, in turn, led him to notice the smell of smoke and the smell of burning plastic, which he immediately determined was coming from his PC, and we’re presuming his panic kicked in while he was mid-stream in his tinkle, which is a very difficult situation to stop abruptly stop mid-stream, but we digress.
The RTX 4090 owner added that their PC was still running when they noticed the smoke and that their system wouldn’t shut down normally. So, they did the next logical thing: unplug the power source from the wall.
The owner said that they had purchased their RTX 4090 back in 2022, the year in which the card was released, and was using the 12VHPWR cable that came with the PSU, an FSP HPT2-1000M, rather than the adapter. They also said that they had regularly checked to see if the cable was properly seated and never bent at a severe angle. But alas, the card still burned.
You know what we’re going to say: this isn’t the first RTX 4090 to lose itself to a faulty or bad 12VHPWR connector. The issue goes all the way back to the year when the card was first released, and has persisted even with NVIDIA’s latest RTX 50 Series GPUs.
The star and hero of the show, if we may, is obviously the Catguard system that was in place. And yes, that cat image is, in fact, the furry feline that belongs to the owner of the now burnt-out RTX 4090, and is deserving of many, many treats and pets and loves, and just look at that face. Sweet Jesus, you just want to shower it with all the love and scritchies.
(Source: PTT, Videocardz)
