Melted RTX 4090 & the Journey getting it Fixed!
Recently my RTX 4090 melted! The original Nvidia cables that shipped with the 4090 were underrated and not suited for the power hungry RTX 4090.
My Original RTX 4090
I had bought the 4090 right when it became available in Canada back in May in 2023 (we don’t get the immediate release like the US) and I never touched the unit after it was installed. In November 2025, I got a client job that required a lot of work in Unreal Engine and that’s when I started to notice my PC crashing more often without reason. The first conclusion I came to was that I didn’t have enough power in my PSU. At the time, I was working with 1000W, which isn’t bad, but I got a lot of hard drives, the Threadripper uses 280W itself, and the RTX 4090 uses 500W itself. Needless to say the 1000W was cutting it close, I even had to unplug my dual RTX 2080’s and the Blu-ray player, to conserve power for the 4090. This worked well for a year, without any issues! I even made a couple of games in UE as learning exercises, however when real work came down for UE, this setup didn’t really cut it! As most of my fans might already know, I am mainly a Houdini user and I’m not as proficient in UE compared to Houdini.
I found a Corsair HX1500i Power Supply and it was on sale for roughly ~ $320 CAD, which is a pretty good deal for the i series because they are more power efficient saving you energy costs in the long run. Installing this onto my machine started the whole train wreck of discovering my RTX 4090 had melted the header right into the socket connector on board the GPU. Some of the RTX 4090 users may remember the news of Nvidia shipping underrated cables with the 4090 at the time of release and people were talking unofficially in community forums and blog articles were saying the After Market power cables were much better because at least they weren’t underrated. I knew about this when buying the 4090, but I didn’t really think much of it at the time. Lesson learned…. don’t buy anything that comes out right away. Wait for all the bugs to get fixed first.
Melted Power Socket Type4 Cable for RTX 4090
Melted Power Socket Type4 Cable for RTX 4090
The first thing I needed to do was unplug the 4090 from my old setup and install the new power supply. Right when unplugging the cable, the header immediately crumbled before my eyes, like a cookie. To make things worse, there was part of the melted header stuck in the socket, so I couldn’t plug a new Type4 cable into it even though I had a fully rated 600W cable for the new 4090. It came with the Corsair Power Supply.
I tried to clean it out by blowing on it and turning it upside down, hoping it the small pieces would just fall out. In the end, my naiive actions didn’t make a difference. In the end I had to contact Zotac’s RMA department and get it fixed. This was a whole journey in itself. I didn’t know Zotac has a very small presence in Canada, so the RMA process was extremely long! Thank god, I had my RTX 2080’s as a backup GPU to use during this time. The Threadripper CPU doesn’t have an integrated graphics so I would have been a sitting on a large paper weight if not for my RTX 2080.
The Corsair 1500W was definitely overkill for the RTX 2080, but in return my PC never crashed on its own while running UE! Not even once! So at least I was right about the power thing.
After much back and forth and A LOT OF WAITING, I finally got my RMA unit for my RTX 4090 in February 2026. Just to remind you readers, it was November 2025 when this all started. Zotac actually only took about 1-3 months to find a replacement RMA unit for me, but my ticket got lost in the first month of communication with Zotac so that wasted a lot of time in between. Word of advise, don’t reply to every email Zotac sends you. I had read somewhere that their ticketing system resets on every reply that is sent. If you keep messaging them in the same thread, it doesn’t speed up the process!
