Brand New RTX 4090’s Shipped With Revised Shortened Sense Pins

Recently a new specification for the 12VHPWR connector was shared with the key feature of the shortened sense pins to help prevent user error when inserting the connector. Last week it was found that the RTX 4070 FE quietly shipped with this sense pin revision and now it turns out new RTX 4090 FE cards are also featuring the same revision.

RTX 4090 Power Connector Revision

This new revision was shared on the r/NVIDIA subreddit by u/prackprackprack (via VideoCardz) who has just recently got their hands on a brand new RTX 4090 FE. Prackprackprack shared several photos of the connector which looks to feature the shortened sense pins of the new PCI-SIG spec for the 12V-12×6 connector. Below you can see a comparison from NVIDIA’s Official Founders Edition Teardown on the left to prackprackpracks photo on the right with what appears to be shortened sense pins, though of course, differing perspectives come into account here.

Why Is NVIDIA Keeping Quiet?

So the RTX 4070 and 4090 FE cards feature this revision but NVIDIA doesn’t seem interested in actually sharing this information themselves about the change. The way I see it this is something they don’t think people will notice and probably are just hoping that the problem will quietly go away with the revised and “safer” connectors and people will forget it happened. Unfortunately, that isn’t how the internet works and I’m sure NVIDIA knows that very well but at the same time if they announced it they will get flamed for effectively admitting that the connector was poorly designed. It is worth noting that there is some speculation about this actually being the new PCI-SIG spec as some seem to see this as either a manufacturing error or a choice that NVIDIA made however the post with some of this speculation has since been deleted.

Why do you think NVIDIA is not mentioning these revisions? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.