I’m happy to report that my DIY adapter cable has worked flawlessly under Furmark and Cyberpunk for the last 20 hours with a Silverstone 1000W SFX-L PSU at 133% power limit (500-600W).
buildzoid featured my blog article in their recent video, feels good:
As a clarification, I wasn’t aware Nvidia was soldering fewer, thicker gauge wires to a bridged terminal block. You won’t be able to re-terminate the stock Nvidia adapter cable (nor would you want to), build your own complete cable from your PSU. I’m astonished, really, two defects while they already should have known due to SIG reports before they put the cards on sale.
Makes sense that you shouldn’t bend solder joints, just keep in mind that individually terminated terminals should be fine to bend the wires of just like any other connector once they become more widely available, with in mind that you should still ensure all terminal pins are seated within the connector after bending as wire lengths can still put some tension on each wire.
As for why I think Nvidia released this design of adapter, Gamers Nexus has a good video about why USB-C took so long to make it to PC cases back in the day. The reason is that those terminal crimps have to be done manually, by hand. Scaling that in a post-COVID world along with the sheer scale of the number of units Nvidia needs for a launch would be difficult, if not overly expensive.
The connector is also new, so don’t expect automation and tooling to have been well thought out and implemented just yet; at least that’s my assumptions. Soldering 8 wires is a heck of a lot more cost effective and efficient than hand crimping 12 wires (plus PCIE crimps).
Regardless of cost, it’s likely that it would have been impossible for Nvidia to crank enough out, period, to support the 4090 and 4080 launches, but again, an assumption. Still, looks bad, especially when SIG already said it was an issue before launch.
It also seems that many ATX 3 PSUs have been delayed. We’ve had Asus announce their SFX ATX 3.0 PSUs to come out Q3 of 2022 and it’s Q4 now. I blame supply chain issues.
Ross Fisher 