Owners of RTX 4090 (opens in new tab) graphics cards, frustrated by the infamous power connector melting issue, have filed a class action lawsuit against Nvidia (opens in new tab) The lawsuit, filed in California state court on November 11, could make for could make for painful reading, and contains numerous allegations ranging from fraud to unjust enrichment.

The lawsuit references widely reported instances of the new 16-pin power connectors used on Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4090 boards overheating and melting under heavy loads. (opens in new tab)

Allegedly, (opens in new tab) the lawsuit alleges that Nvidia "sold the RTX 4090 with defective and unsafe power cable plug(s) and socket(s), which rendered consumers' cards inoperable and posed each purchaser with a serious electrical . posed a serious electrical and fire hazard to each purchaser."

Notably, claimant Lucas Genova describes himself as "experienced in the installation of computer components such as graphics cards" in an attempt to circumvent user error.

To demonstrate the pervasive nature of the defect, the lawsuit references a Reddit thread (opens in new tab). The thread documents the technical characteristics of the glitch in forensic detail, as well as the logs of 26 Reddit users who experienced the problem (at the time of writing).

The percentage of boards suffering from the malfunction is currently unknown. Recent tests by Igor's Lab in Germany (opens in new tab) suggest that the problem is likely to be worse with boards shipped with adapters from supplier Astron, and that NTK connectors are somewhat less likely to melt.

In the Reddit thread above, an unnamed graphics card manufacturer states that the failure rate is between 0.05 percent and 0.1 percent, or one failure for every 1,000 to 2,000 boards.

How Nvidia intends to clean this up is currently unknown. However, given the seemingly ever-increasing scale of the failures, it would not be surprising if an official recall, the supply of different adapters, or some sort of formal compensation scheme eventually comes into play.