The peculiar story that we are about to tell you has been making a lot of noise on Reddit for three days, and with good reason. Its unwitting protagonists are a graphics card and a power cable, but this time it’s not a GeForce RTX 4090 and a 12VHPWR connector. As some of our readers will remember at the end of October 2022, several users of this NVIDIA graphics hardware assured on Reddit that the power connector of their RTX 4090 had been partially damaged.
NVIDIA investigated it and a few days later issued a statement ensuring that this problem could be avoided if users make sure that they have connected the power of our graphics card correctly. It is not clear that this is the origin of all the incidents that have been reported by some owners of the GeForce RTX 4090, but the person responsible for the surreal story in which we are about to investigate is the user of the graphics card. Of that there is no doubt. Prepare to be stunned.
Graphics card power deserves our full attention
Modern graphics cards communicate with the processor in our computers through a PCI Express 3.0 or 4.0 link. This high-speed bus allows them to maintain a constant dialogue, and, in addition, provides electrical power to the graphics card, but not enough. Not, at least, if we opt for a minimally powerful gaming GPU. For this reason, when we install a graphics card in our PC, we not only have to worry about connecting it correctly to the appropriate PCI Express slot; We must also feed it using the power connectors that it requires.
When we install a new graphics card in our PC it is crucial that we feed it correctly
A friend has lent the protagonist of this story a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. You can see it in the photograph that we publish below these lines. This graphics card incorporates two power connectors: one 6-pin and one 8-pin. Apparently the owner of this PC only had a free 6+2-pin power connector, so, without thinking twice, it occurred to him to connect the six-pin block to the six-pin connector of the graphics card, and the block with the two additional pins to the eight-pin connector on the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. You can see it in this photo:
Source: Reddit
What you should have done, as all hardware enthusiasts know, is use two power cables like the one you used, and not just one. With two 6+2 pin cables You would have the problem solved, and if you don’t have a second cable, you might have no choice but to replace your power supply with another one with a higher power delivery capacity and connectivity to match.
It would also do you no harm to clean the inside of your PC to remove the dust that has accumulated. When the dirt is excessive, it is possible that the rotor of one of the fans gets stuck, which can prevent the correct cooling of some of the computer’s components, and can even cause them to break down.
Despite having made this mistake, this user has been lucky. your graphics card has not been damaged because the two pins you connected to the eight-pin jack on the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti provide the ground connection and tell the source that this power jack has been mated with an eight-pin connector. This is all.
The graphics card has not worked, as expected, and therefore has not sent the slightest video signal to the monitor, but it is enough to feed it correctly for it to carry out its function without problem. In this case, this story has a happy ending, but above all it serves to remind us that when we build a PC we must be careful and make sure that we have connected everything correctly.
Cover image: Martín López
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