alt Hacker NewsI am a volunteer firefighter and hold a degree in electrical engineering. The shenanigans with their shunt resistors, and ensuing melting cables, is in my view criminal. Any engineer worth their salt would recognize pushing 600W through a bunch of small cables with no contingency if some of them have failed is just asking for trouble. These assholes are going to set someone's house on fire.
I hope they get hit with a class action lawsuit and are forced to recall and properly fix these products before anyone dies as a result of their shoddy engineering.
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Also, like, I kind of want to play with these things, but also I'm not sure I want a computer that uses 500W+ in my house, let alone just a GPU.
I might actually be happy to buy one of these things, at the inflated price, and run it at half voltage or something... but I can't tell if that is going to fix these concerns or they're just bad cards.
Has anyone made 12VHPWR cables that replace the 12 little wires with 2 large gauge wires yet? That would prevent the wires from becoming unbalanced, which should preempt the melting connector problem.
As a bonus, if the gauge is large enough, the cable would actually cool the connectors, although that should not be necessary since the failure appears to be caused by overloaded wires dumping heat into the connector as they overheat.
To emphasize this point, go outside at noon in the summer and mark off a square meter on the sidewalk. That square of concrete is receiving about 1000w from the sun.
Now imagine a magnifying glass that big (or more practically a fresnel lens) concentrating all that light into one square inch. That's a lot of power. When copper connections don't work perfectly they have nonzero resistance, and the current running through them turns into heat by I^2R.
Apparently somebody did sue a couple years back. Anyone know what happened with the Lucas Genova vs. nVidia lawsuit?
EDIT: Plantiff dismissed it. Guessing they settled. Here are the court documents (alternately, shakna's links below include unredacted copies):
https://www.classaction.org/media/plaintiff-v-nvidia-corpora...
https://www.classaction.org/media/plaintiff-v-nvidia-corpora...
A GamersNexus article investigating the matter: https://gamersnexus.net/gpus/12vhpwr-dumpster-fire-investiga...
And a video referenced in the original post, describing how the design changed from one that proactively managed current balancing, to simply bundling all the connections together and hoping for the best: https://youtu.be/kb5YzMoVQyw