>> 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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
An old legacy car is definitely not more complicated than designing and manufacturing a cutting edge silicon made for high performance compute.
The price difference is just the free market supply and demand at work.
People and businesses pay more for the latest Nvidia GPUs than for an old car because for their use case it's worth it, they can't get a better GPU from anywhere else because they're complex to design and manufacture en-masse and nobody else than Nvidia + TSMC can do it right now.
People pay less for an old beater car than for Nvidia GPUs, because it's not worth it, there's a lot better options out there in terms of cars and cars are interchangeable commodities easy and cheap to design and manufacture at scale at this point, but there's no better options easier to replace what Nvidia is selling.
Comparing a top GPU with old cars is like comparing apples to monkeys, it makes no sense that doesn't prove any point.
>An old legacy car is definitely not more complicated than designing and manufacturing a cutting edge silicon made for high performance compute.
A car is more complicated than a connector, at least.
Anyways, the rest of your comment is again taking a humorous one-liner way too seriously. Thanks for the econ lesson though, I guess. I liked the part where you explained to me the basics of supply and demand like I am in 5th grade.
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.
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.