The drive to push the performance envelope of modern GPUs often comes at the cost of power. As NVIDIA's high-end cards keep climbing in performance, so does the frequency of their power connectors melting down. This time, however, it's not even a flagship model like the 4090 or 5090, but rather a budget GPU from the Ampere series — the RTX 3060 Ti.
A user on Baidu reported the power connector of their RTX 3060 Ti GDDR6X melting down in a freak incident, specifically the Asus Megalodon V2. It's worth noting that this is a special variant of the 3060 Ti designed exclusively for the Chinese market and, as such, it features a 12VHPWR power connector instead of the standard 8 or 6-pin that was the default with the 30-series.
However, the cable that the user received was a standard 12-pin cable that lacked the additional 4 pins present in a normal 16-pin 12VHPWR connector. These extra four pins are purposefully there to ensure a secure connection between the card and the cable, precisely in order to combat situations like this one.
Therefore, this can be chalked up to a strange and unacceptable mistake on Asus' part, especially when you dig a little deeper. In the photos supplied by the user, a dual 8-pin to 12-pin adapter can be seen, which ships with some 12-pin GPUs for use with older power supplies that don't have these new connectors.
So, despite the 3060 Ti rocking a 12VHPWR connector, the user received a 12-pin cable (and adapter) in the box, both of which are catalysts for a fire hazard. But it doesn't end there. All this happened while the card does not even need the beefy 16-pin connector in the first place, as it's just a 3060 Ti, which has a maximum power draw of 310W.
12VHPWR connectors don't have an issue supplying power up to 400W; it's only beyond that threshold where it starts to overheat, regardless of how tight the connection is. Here, the missing four pins that forced a 16-pin connector into a 12-pin one essentially guaranteed a loose fit that would ultimately lead to its demise.
This is the first-ever case of a relatively low-power GPU getting fried like this post the introduction of 16-pin connectors. No matter where it goes, 12VHPWR always finds itself in trouble. Sure, maybe there's some user error at play here, but shipping the wrong cable out of the box is a far more dangerous precedent to set than victim blaming.
Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News to get our up-to-date news, analysis, and reviews in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button.
