Topic: pcie splitter meltdowns (Read 171 times)

It’s almost never the quality of the cable it’s always the connection. I’ve seen many PSU with thin gauge wires and there was never any issues. The issue always lies with the connection male and female pins.

This is the same reason why there are so many people who got melted modular PSU pins. Basically they disconnect and connect the pins a few times and each time the female end gets looser and looser and eventually pulling too much current and it starts to melt.

Even gamers faced this issue many times. Hence why I always disliked modular PSU for anything mining related.

is it working good for you? I made few pcie on my own too but it can be a pain w/o proper crimping tool.
And cable more than 1mm2 is amost immposible to use.

poor connection joint can cause overheating that joint.

The quality of that cable sucks 👎, I'm guessing it's one of those china cables, you can tell the difference simply by holding it and another in your hand, go online and other quality cables they are few dollars more costly than this crap

Thats why i do my own cables with good thick cables.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32868919025.html?spm=a2g0s.9042311.0.0.77934c4d2NJkAY

Yeah the 120 watts was pretty accurate (card reported) as it matched the power pulled from the wall.  I'd say the chinese splitters were crap but I couldn't find any other source.  Anyway problem is fixed for good now.

I was going to say that most likely your splitter was badly built. Generally the OEM power supply connectors are good quality and shouldn't give you issues unless you run too much current thru them. Another thing to note is when you say 120 Watts? Is this accurate? How did you measure it? Because with some GPUs it can say 120 Watts in the software but in reality it can pull something like 150 Watts.

I did something similar as you. Just bought a crimp tool and the pins and made many custom cables such as your. Never had any issues either because I bought gold plated pins and they were all perfect snug fit and never got hot or melted.

Its getting close to 4 years I have been mining with 3 rigs of 8 cards (8 x 1070, 8 x 1070ti, 8 x 1070ti).  They run 24/7 in a smallish room (2.4 x 3 metres), sitting on old carpet in an old flat. In an Australian summer, ambient can go north of 40 degrees Celsius.  Basically, hell on earth for mining rigs.  Fans began to fail after 6 months due to the dust, solved by replacing the sleeve bearings with double ball bearings.  But the biggest problem is heat.  Remarkably, the only issues I have had besides the fans is the pcie splitters melting.

Each rig has a silverstone 1500ti power supply rated to handle 150 watts from each of the 8 pcie outputs.  Each output supplies one card through a pcie splitter, (one for the riser and one for the card)  Each card is limited to around 120 watts so there should be no problem with this arrangement.

However over time I discovered some of the pcie splitter connectors began to overheat to the point of wires melting/breaking.  Some were fine but many were too hot to touch even if they were still working.  The wires were cool, it was just the splitter connector that was failing.  Clearly the dusty hot environment was causing issues.  So I implemented a final solution of cutting off the connectors and soldering them on.  That's 24 cables I had to butcher so it took a while.





That has entirely solved the issue with the bonus of saving around 40 watts of power per rig.  That presumably was how much heat was being wasted in the connector.

Connectors are always going to be a weak spot, the fewer the better and those you have, you should check occasionally.  If they're getting hot, do something about it!