Nvidia's price is $1,599 USD. The GeForce RTX 4090 is an extremely powerful graphics card with a substantial power drain in return for its performance.
Similar to several of the RTX 3000-series cards, Nvidia supplies the card with power via a novel 16-pin 12VHPWR power connector. To save some board space, up to four 8-pin GPU power cables may be connected to the 12VHPWR adaptor, which then connects to the GPU's socket.
The 12VHPWR connections of at least two RT 4090 customers, however, have reportedly overheated and melted while in operation. We don't know the precise setup of each user's PC, These complaints were obtained from Reddit (via Tom's Hardware). The power supply, the exact type of graphics card (a Gigabyte RTX 4090 Gaming OC for one user, an Asus RTX 4090 TUF Gaming OC Edition for the other), and a variety of other elements might have caused the connections to overheat.
Nvidia, for its part, informed Tom's that it was "investigating the complaints," that it was "in communication with the first owner," and that it was going to get in touch with the other owner. Nvidia was contacted again, and if it has further information to give, we'll update this piece.
According to Tom's Hardware, the problem can result from a cable bend that is too close to the power connection, which might cause some of the pins to "misalign" or become unseated, potentially resulting in an unequal power load across the pins. We'll continue monitoring the situation until it becomes evident if these were isolated user errors or a symptom of a larger issue with the RTX 4090 series.