[readingnews]

>> Connectors are actually extremely difficult to make.

While your points listed are valid, we have been making connectors that overcome these points for decades, in some cases approaching the century mark.

>> I'm not surprised at all that they are running into issues here, these cards are pulling 500+ watts. That is a LOT of current.

Nonsense. I used to work at an industrial power generation company. 500W is _nothing_. At 12VDC, that is 41.66A of current. A few, small, well made pins and wires can handle that. It should not be a big deal to overcome that. We have overcome that in cars (which undergo _extreme_ temperature and environmental changes, in mere minutes and hours, daily, for years), space stations (geez), appliances, and thousands of other industrial applications that you do not see (robots, cranes, elevators, equipment in fields and farmlands, equipment in mines, equipment misused by people)... and those systems fail less frequently than Nvidia connectors. But your comment would lead one to think that building a connector with twelve pins on it to handle a whopping (I am joking) 500W (not much, really, I have had connectors in equipment that needed to handle 1,000,000Watts of power, OUTDOORS, IN THE RAIN, and be taken apart and put back together DAILY) is an insurmountable task.

[userbinator]

One word: cost.

Look up how much industrial/automotive connectors cost, and you'll see the huge difference in quality.

[drdaeman]

Those GPUs aren’t particularly cheap, even a $100 connector and cable wouldn’t be a huge deal breaker for a $2000-3000 device if it means it’s reliable and won’t start a fire (that’ll cost way more than $3100)

[vollbrecht]

Yes cheap connectors exist and there is a marked for it, like everything "cheap". But to what point one wants to "defend" a trillion dollar company, on a product that was never marketed as "cheap", that actually comes with a hefty price tag, to skimp on something that is 0.01% of there BoM cost. If you sell for a premium price you should better make sure your product is premium.

[Manozco]

I've bought cars that cost me less than a nVidia card (and they were running).

[FirmwareBurner]

Which new cars cost less than 2000$-1000$?

[ziddoap]

They didn't say new cars.

[FirmwareBurner]

Then what's the point of such an arbitrary comparison? It's normal that plenty of commodities that were expensive when new have been devalued by age and can cost less on the used market than the top of the line BRAND NEW cutting edge GPU today, which itself will be worthless in 10-20 years on the used market and so on.

[ziddoap]

Presumably, the point is that a working car is more complicated & cheaper (in this case) than the graphics card, while the graphics card can't figure out how to make a connector.

I read it as a kind of funny comment making a broader point (and a bit of a jab at nVidia), not a rigorous comparison. I think you might be taking it a bit more seriously than was intended.

[numpad0]

used objects and imports from economically isolated land are traded at meme value, doesn't count.

[janalsncm]

That would be relevant if the margins on GPUs weren’t astronomical.

[broeng]

No, not for a connector for 500W, on a $2000 GPU from one of the worlds biggest companies. They can do better.

[Henchman21]

Well surely they can take that cost out of the $5090 people are paying for these cards.

[state_less]

They could use a common XT90 or something similar. You find high amperage connectors on all the RC lipo batteries and they are cheap enough, you find them on $100 products (batteries).

I regularly work with 100amp+ at 12v. It’s obvious the connector NVidia is using is atrocious and we all know it.

[jnwatson]

Nvidia is clearing 4 figures on each 5090. They can afford another few dollars on connectors.