Key Takeaways
- Nvidia has had some significant failures with graphics cards like the GTX 480, which had serious thermal issues and power leakage.
- Despite launching flawed products like the RTX 4080 that had to be unlaunched and rebranded, Nvidia has learned from its mistakes.
- It still frequently finds itself in the news for things like the 12VHPWR connector issues, and we hope it doesn’t have to deal with anymore “oops moments” in its journey ahead.
Nvidia is one of the biggest names in the tech industry that’s been around for years, revolutionizing how we experience gaming and visual computing. It’s seen a lot of success over the years, and many of its products and services will go down in history as the biggest trendsetters. But even the most innovative companies stumble at times, and we’ve seen that happen to Nvidia as well. That’s right, Nvidia has also had plenty of missteps along the way that had a pretty big impact on gamers and the company itself.
4 Nvidia GeForce GTX 480
The heater and grill memes were wild
Nvidia has dished out some superb graphics cards over the years, with many of them leading the pack at different price points. In fact, a lot of our top graphics cards belong to the current crop of GPUs made by Nvidia. That being said, not all Nvidia graphics cards have been a smashing hit on the market, and it’s got a fair share of GPUs that were pretty bad — if not downright terrible — like the GTX 480.
Nvidia’s GTX 480 will go down as one of Nvidia’s biggest fails of all time. Based on the Fermi (mockingly known as Thermi, with “Th” referring to poor thermals) architecture, the Nvidia GTX 480 was easily the most powerful graphics card at the time, topping benchmark charts and single-handedly beating AMD cards like the Radeon HD 5870 and the likes. But it was downright unusable due to its power-hungry nature. The architecture was so poorly designed and rushed onto the market that this card would just leak power even while idling, which is quite alarming. There was nothing you could’ve done to salvage these cards as they would always leak power and constantly produce heat.
Related
5 GPUs that did not age well at all
Some graphics cards age like fine wine. These GPUs, however, did no such thing and turned out to be simply bad decisions
There are a few recent benchmarks from folks who’ve tried using the GTX 480 now to run modern games, and it seems to hold up pretty well, albeit with the same thermal issues. It’s an inherently flawed graphics card, regardless of how you look at it or how it has held up over the years, and it will certainly go down as one of Nvidia’s biggest duds. Thankfully, Nvidia ended up fixing many of the issues that plagued the Fermi-based GTX 480 by the time its GTX 500 series was released as a part of Fermi 2, and it was dubbed as the family of cards which Nvidia should’ve originally released. The company has definitely come a long way since then, but it can’t escape the memes and laughs.
3 The Titan Z’s commercial flop
Some say the Titan Z was long dead before it was classified as a commercial flop, as it struggled to attract any attention from the very beginning. You could attribute it to its $3,000 price tag, which made it prohibitively expensive for both gamers and professionals, but there are other factors that played a huge role in landing this card on our list of the worst GPUs of all time. The fact that it was based on the aging Kepler architecture when newer architectures at that time were gaining popularity was also a huge factor in its downfall. The Titan Z simply failed to carve out a niche in a market where users had other compelling alternatives that were both better and relatively affordable. Not to mention, the Titan Z also posed practical challenges for users trying to build with it as it consumed too much power and ran too hot.
Related
7 worst GPUs of all time
There are bad GPUs, and then there are GPUs that we’ll never forget because of how disastrous they were.
2 Unlaunching the RTX 4080
“It’s not named right,” it said.
I can’t help but add Nvidia unlaunching the RTX 4080 to this list because, well, when was the last time you saw a company pull the plug on a product just one month after its global release, and pretend like it never existed? That’s precisely what Nvidia did with the 12GB model of the RTX 4080 that debuted globally alongside the RTX 4090 and the RTX 4080 16GB model.
Nvidia did the right thing, in my opinion, by pulling the plug on the 12GB model of the RTX 4080, and later relaunching it as the RTX 4070 Ti. I’m not entirely sure why it took them so long to figure out nobody was going to buy that particular model at that price. The RTX 4070 Ti isn’t necessarily the best card in its 40-series lineup either, but it’s at least an honest graphics card, which isn’t using its name to hide its shortcomings. It’s far from the biggest duds we’ve seen on the market, but it’s something that left a bad taste, just like my next entry on this list, which is considered a failure even if you may or may not have been affected by it.
Related
Best GPUs in 2024: Our top graphics card picks
Picking the right graphics card can be difficult given the sheer number of options on the market. Here are the best graphics cards to consider.
1 Burning RTX 4090 connectors
We’re continuing to see more of them
It’s true that 12VHPWR cables aren’t exclusive to Nvidia graphics cards, and that they’re a PCI-SIG standard that can be used by anyone, but it’s somewhat of an Nvidia saga with its RTX 4090 graphics card at the heart of it all. Even if you are not affected by this particular issue, it’s hard to deny that this is a huge mess, as Nvidia decided to use this particular connector for its most powerful consumer-grade graphics card, ever. Many users out there are still complaining and getting their GPUs fixed, and that smells like burnt cables failure to me. This particular issue, which was supposed to have been put to rest long back with the release of revised models featuring the updated 12V-2×6 connector, is still wrecking havoc. NorthridgeFix, which is one of the more popular repair shops in Los Angeles, says that it’s still receiving RTX 4090 graphics cards in huge numbers with melted connectors.
While NorthridgeFix didn’t explicitly mention whether those RTX 4090 GPUs featured the old connectors or the updated ones, it’s still alarming to see it happening to so many people. The 16 pin adapter megathread on Reddit may have been put to rest now, but the issues still appear to be widespread, and they are continuing to affect the RTX 4090 owners. It’s easy to see why this would make people more cautious about picking up an RTX 4090 or even, say, an RTX 5090, which the company is said to be cooking behind the scenes.
Related
Nvidia RTX 4090 power connectors are melting – What you can do to minimize the risk
Another year and another controversy emerges over Nvidia’s flagship graphics cards. But you can minimize your own risk of it happening to you.
Nvidia has had plenty of other “Oops moments”
Nvidia has had plenty of other missteps over the years, although the ones highlighted above stand out as some of the biggest challenges it faced. The company’s ‘Hairworks’ project, for instance, is something that never really took off in a big way, and no one uses it anymore, at least as far as I know. It’s been interesting to see how the company handled its failure over the years, and I hope it doesn’t have to deal with any more “oops moments” in its journey ahead.