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Nvidia won, we all lost

(blog.sebin-nyshkim.net)
977 points todsacerdoti | 7 comments | | HN request time: 1.095s | source | bottom
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rkagerer ◴[] No.44469388[source]
I am a volunteer firefighter and hold a degree in electrical engineering. The shenanigans with their shunt resistors, and ensuing melting cables, is in my view criminal. Any engineer worth their salt would recognize pushing 600W through a bunch of small cables with no contingency if some of them have failed is just asking for trouble. These assholes are going to set someone's house on fire.

I hope they get hit with a class action lawsuit and are forced to recall and properly fix these products before anyone dies as a result of their shoddy engineering.

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1. lukeschlather ◴[] No.44469778[source]
Also, like, I kind of want to play with these things, but also I'm not sure I want a computer that uses 500W+ in my house, let alone just a GPU.

I might actually be happy to buy one of these things, at the inflated price, and run it at half voltage or something... but I can't tell if that is going to fix these concerns or they're just bad cards.

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2. wasabinator ◴[] No.44469918[source]
It's not the voltage, it's the current you'd want to halve. The wire gauge required to carry power is dependent on the current load. It's why when i first saw these new connectors and the loads they were being tasked with it was a wtf moment for me. Better to just avoid them in the first place though.
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3. dietr1ch ◴[] No.44470000[source]
It's crazy, you don't even need to know about electricity after you see a thermal camera on them operating at full load. I'm surprised they can be sold to the general public, the reports of cables melting plus the high temps should be enough to force a recall.
4. izacus ◴[] No.44470831[source]
With 5080 using 300W, talking about 500W is a bit of an exaggeration, isn't it?
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5. lukeschlather ◴[] No.44474656[source]
I'm talking about the 5090 which is 575W.
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6. izacus ◴[] No.44475133{3}[source]
But why are you talking about it? It's a hugely niche hardware which is a tiny % of nVidia cards out there. It's deliberately outsized and you wouldn't put it in 99% of gaming PCs.

And yet you speak of it like it's a representative model. Do you also use a Hummer EV to measure all EVs?

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7. lukeschlather ◴[] No.44475718{4}[source]
I am interested in buying hardware that can run the full DeepSeek R1 locally. I don't think it's a particularly good idea, but I've contemplated an array of 5090s.

If I were interested in using an EV to haul particularly heavy loads, I might be interested in the Hummer EV and have similar questions that might sound ridiculous.