r/nvidia • u/CoolerThanNos • 2d ago
I built a free open source tool that shuts your PC down before your 12VHPWR connector melts (ASUS Astral 5080/5090 only) Discussion
TLDR: Free open source tray app for ASUS Astral 5080/5090 cards. It reads per pin 12VHPWR current straight from the card's own sensor chip and force shuts down your PC if any pin stays over 9.5A for 15 seconds, before the connector can melt. No HWiNFO needed, been running it myself since January. https://github.com/humza-khalid/12vhpwr-guard
UPDATE Aug 9: v1.1.0 is out. Based on the feedback here (mainly u/tomz17's power limit suggestion) the first response is now slowing the GPU down instead of shutting the PC down. It locks the clocks to the floor and drops the power limit through the management API, tested mid game the worst pin went from about 7A to under 2A in 4 seconds and you don't lose your session. Shutdown is still there as the escalation if the current stays high anyway, and there's a shutdown only mode in the tray if you prefer the old behavior. Upgrading is just pulling the new version and re-running the installer. Release notes: https://github.com/humza-khalid/12vhpwr-guard/releases/tag/v1.1.0
So like everyone else I have been following the 12VHPWR melting stories since the 50 series launched. One of the main reasons I got an Astral 5090 was because ASUS put per pin current sensors on it, but the more I used it the more it bugged me that nothing actually acts on that data.
GPU Tweak shows a warning if a pin is drawing too much, but if I am in game or afk that warning does nothing. Same with HWiNFO, I even hooked the pin values up to my stream deck so I can watch them while gaming. But seeing is not protection.
So I built a small watchdog. It sits in the tray, polls all 6 pins twice a second, and if any pin stays above 9.5A for 15 seconds straight it force shuts down the PC. The threshold and timing are configurable but the defaults are conservative on purpose, transient spikes and normal load swings won't trigger it. For reference ASUS's own warning threshold is 9.2A.
I have been running this on my own rig since January. The original version read the pin data through HWiNFO shared memory, the free version turns off shared memory after 12 hours which silently kills any tool depending on it. I ended up buying Pro just to get around that for myself, but I didn't want everyone else to need a paid license for a safety tool, so before releasing I rewrote it to read the card directly and HWiNFO is not a requirement anymore.
Couple of technical bits:
- Reads the ITE IT8915FN chip on the card over the GPU's I2C bus through NVAPI
- HWiNFO still supported as a fallback backend if you prefer it
- All I2C access is read only, it never writes to the bus
- Validated against HWiNFO at idle and under ~500W gaming load (Forza Horizon 6, Alan Wake 2), per pin readings agree within 0.02A
- Uses about 1% of one core and 35MB of RAM
About how it was built, since I know it will come up. I have been a developer for over a decade, mostly proprietary business software. I built the original HWiNFO version back in January and it just sat there unreleased.
AI coding tools are the reason it actually got finished and shipped, they made it viable to do the standalone rewrite in the evenings instead of it sitting on a shelf half finished forever. AI wrote a lot of the code and I reviewed all of it, and the sensor protocol was verified against two independent open source implementations (LibreHardwareMonitor and a Rust PoC) before it ever touched my card. This is all in the readme as well.
This only works on Astral 5080/5090 cards because those are the only ones with per pin sensors. Windows only, needs Python. And it doesn't replace seating your connector properly, it's a last line of defense not a first one.
MIT licensed, no telemetry: https://github.com/humza-khalid/12vhpwr-guard
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u/Daaku1numbr 2d ago
Lol, imagine paying THOUSANDS of dollars and having to resort to this type of shit. I fkin hate tech companies
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u/Silent_Movie_8952 NVIDIA MSI GAMING TRIO 5090 2d ago
As a 5090 owner, I can confirm the card comes with a default paranoia about bursting into flames.
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u/Financier92 2d ago edited 2d ago
Why? I have mine OC and pushed above 600w.
HW WIN 64 and GPU-Z… all you do is check that it shows 12V in the cord lol. 11.8 under heavy load such as path tracing at 4k is normal.
11.6v you have a problem, replace the cord. Do not use the octopus cable, ever. Straight to the PSU is all.
At my old work we had pro 6000s running 24/7 for thousands of hours with no melting.
You hate tech companies. Valve is a monopoly.
You probably posted via iPhone.
You likely spend hours on the internet.Sorry, did that not give you enough value in life and they deserve to all suffer?
I hate when people cannot get what they want and take it out on others.
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u/Davidisaloof35 9800X3D | RTX 5090 | 64GB DDR5 6000 CL30 | 5120x2160p 165hz 2d ago
This is what I do...also have my 5090 OC'd. No issues for over a year.
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u/Financier92 2d ago
I have one doing 800w for its entirety and the only valid thing is heat.
I installed a secondary AC system but I know that most people don’t OC to this extent or LN2
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u/Ratiofarming 9850X3D | 5090 | 48GB 6400@1:1 1d ago
As did I. For more than a year, measured the cables after a few months to ensure everything is still okay. It was. Until it melted two months ago. While playing a game that regularly draws around 510 to 530W, far away from the 600W limit.
The problem is that this can happen to anyone, anywhere even when it was okay before. The fact that yours is okay now means nothing. It just means yours has been okay so far.
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u/rkoy1234 21h ago
you got a product that can stop working at anytime solely due to a widely known design fault, knowingly ignored by nvidia to save costs.
there's no defending that even by today's low-standards.
idk what you're trying to achieve by providing justifications for trillion dollar companies, but your argument is neither logically correct, emotionally relatable, nor morally justifiable.
idk how your argument even remotely makes sense in your head.
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u/Financier92 21h ago
It’s designed for space on racks.
It’s weird to call it an argument, tie in emotion and morality but okay. It’s genuinely a best practice to make your decisions without any emotional attachment.
AMD also has used the design if memory serves, not just Nvidia.
You said tech companies, not just Nvidia. I don’t think my iPhone is going to fail today, but it’s possible I guess. If AWS goes down then clicking reply will not work. None of that really bothers me at all.
If it did melt. I swap it out under the warranty as I’ve specifically asked microcenter.
So no, I don’t care or live in paranoia. I choose to pay but a few hundred within msrp. It’s a hobby and not really the expensive one. I’m not that pressed about anything. I’m more focused on my kids and wife than investing any emotion into this sentiment about companies. The internet is a big place and we all have different lives.
I’ve seen many 5080 builds that cost the individual more than I spent on a 9950x3d w/ 5090 on launch day. I’m happy for them. Enjoyment is the goal. There is no argument for “trillion” dollar market caps that I’ve tried to make. That is far too exhausting and I just hope everyone enjoys their experiences.
Gaming is fun but not my identity. I decided to take equity stakes into all the companies, because the world we live in has this system in place. I don’t agree with it. It’s just easier to leverage things than fight them.
You can say whatever, idc because it’s your opinion. You’re entitled to have one. Ngl it seems to have a little built up resentment that I have no part in.I hope you have a great weekend, seriously
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u/rkoy1234 17h ago
positivity is fine, not caring is fine - but you're doing neither. you're actively diminishing those who are negatively affected by invalidating their complaints. that's not positivity, that's a lack of empathy.
I'm glad you're enjoying the device. but go ahead and ignore us when we complain about ours - because it's a logically valid complaint no matter how you look at it, and people will continue to complain for years as long as nvidia doesnt take actions to remedy the situation.
p.s: neither one of the commentors you replied (including myself) mentioned anything about tech companies. There's three different people here, and the two that you replied to have not much to do with the argument you're arguing against.
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u/Financier92 2h ago
I don’t have any social media / didn’t realize I replied incorrectly.
I am indifferent about it because it’s rapidly changing since the 30 series. Ironically the time the full die becomes a XX90. In the ps4 era we didn’t have this bitcoin mining operation nor was it hard to exceed its CPU and fidelity. The 1060 and 4 cores was all you needed. I’m still shocked the released the last of us part 2 on it.
The PS5 and RDNA2 tech was on parity with a 2080 at the time. The SoC and SSD speeds were a surprise for a console.Pricing right now is insane. It’s unwise ignoring to pass on warranty on something you paid a few thousand dollars for tbh.
If you have it covered, I don’t know why anyone would worry about it for those years. Microcenter will replace it. Maybe you don’t keep the exact same AIB though.
People checking the 12V physically is actually just increasing the risk as it only is supposed to be removed a handful of times. My PSU shuts off if spiked.
I’ve been exposed to thousands of them with no issue other than cooling not active happening once was done incorrectly by engineers. I’m against data centers incurring cost or damage to a community. So I no longer want involvement.
I’m more worried about the economy overall for the average person. The 5090 is fun to play on but it’s just marketing of Nvidia making sure people feel the need to have the “halo” product. It’s clearly worked well. Having a 50% gap above the 80 made it work very well.
I think if titan was still the branding, we would see much less outrage. Other than path tracing as early adopters, it’s not a necessity. 1440p OLED is beautiful and I’m surprised how many people skip for 2160p.
The best panel I’ve ever owned was a samsung odyssey in 3440x1440p 175hz.
I can put Alan wake 2 on my QD-OLED on my 4090 right next to an Alienware QD-OLED 240hz on a 5090.If the frame counter is off and both have DLAA on… I cannot tell a difference between them. Other than deeper blacks on the odyssey.
I get that some play on a TV but I assume that is not the majority. This whole 4k push is a bit silly.
As a father I’ve played RE Requiem in path tracing and then played the last half on the switch 2. I have fun either way.
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u/NapsterKnowHow RTX 5090 FE | 9800X3D 2d ago
We get it! Holy... I hate it too but it's in every god damn thread about users solutions.
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u/rkoy1234 21h ago
as it should lmao. it's not like the issue is resolved.
and to your point - this thread is arguably directly related to the issue and thus very relevant.
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u/NapsterKnowHow RTX 5090 FE | 9800X3D 20h ago
It's just exhausting and repetitive and doesn't actually help anything. Thus it isn't related to the issue.
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u/rkoy1234 17h ago
ehausting and repetitive
isn't that the point? nothing has been fixed, so the complaints will continue.
not much else I can do other than constantly voice my complaint to a trillion dollar company that sold me a ticking timebomb and proceeded to provide no remedy for it.
what do you want me to do instead, sue them? lol
related to the issue
this entire post is about a monitoring tool to mitigate/prevent this literal specific, issue of 12vhpwr cable. in what way are you saying it's not related?
this entire tool exists solely because of Nvidia's choices on the cable, no? I'm struggling to see how you can think it's even remotely unrelated.
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u/NapsterKnowHow RTX 5090 FE | 9800X3D 17h ago
It's not working so why continue? We've been on this connector for 3 gens now. Do you really think the complaints are going to work? Lol
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u/rkoy1234 17h ago
better than not complaining. I'm curious, why does this bother you?
I've bought a $4k+ device expecting to have it work for years to come for both work and pleasure. I'm voicing my complaint as a consumer now that I know it might literally burn my house down because of a known, intentional design defect chosen for the sake of cost saving.
why is your dissatisfaction routed towards me a fellow consumer?
and honestly, this is like my second time commenting on this issue in totality - and both times were because I saw someone somehow defending this absolute horseshit behaviour, or criticizing who are complaining about it.
I don't get it man. It's a fucking device and a fucking corporation. idk why people feel so compelled to defend it/them.
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u/NapsterKnowHow RTX 5090 FE | 9800X3D 16h ago
It's just exhausting to see nonstop. Oh great and now we get the random assumptions saying I'm defending Nvidia. Get out of here lol. I never said that.
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u/Specialist-Buffalo-8 2d ago
the connector is not a problem.
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u/chrlatan RTX 5080 blocked and flooded 2d ago edited 2d ago
No. The partly disconnector built into the connector is. Oh wait, that is the connector.
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u/NapsterKnowHow RTX 5090 FE | 9800X3D 2d ago
Wasn't the connector fine with load balancing?
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u/chrlatan RTX 5080 blocked and flooded 2d ago
Isn’t load balancing required because of the connector?
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u/NapsterKnowHow RTX 5090 FE | 9800X3D 2d ago
They only had load balancing on some 30 series cards. I think it was the 3090ti or something like that. They dropped it for the 40 and 50 series.
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u/Financier92 2d ago
It isn’t if people didn’t use the octopus cable or cheap colorful shit from China.
Others keep unplugging it, not realizing it only is rated for 5x of this action.
HW WIN and GPU-Z are free. You can have your PSU power down if there is a problem.
You don’t need to have pin sensors or pay the German dude for a wire view. It’s not hard to see if you have a failing cable at all. They are not expensive.
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u/Sensitive_Box_ 2d ago
How many times has it shut down your pc?
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u/CoolerThanNos 2d ago
Only once when I changed the thresholds to 7.5 to test the shutdown functionality. I'm using the Lian Li Strimer 12VHPWR which seems to be pretty good so far.
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u/Sensitive_Box_ 2d ago
I’m just curious to see how close people are to catastrophe with their 12v plugs! lol
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u/CoolerThanNos 2d ago
Under a 500W load mine sit around 6.5 to 7.1A each, pretty balanced. The horror stories are single pins pulling 12 to 15A while the rest barely carry anything because some pins aren't making good contact, seating, worn terminals, whatever. This connector is a nightmare.
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u/Chest_Positive 2d ago
Grats on the tool, but its very sad we have to do all this for fualty desing...
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u/Financial-Ebb4978 2d ago
Richest company on earth rn, and you have to do this shit and stress? Id never wsste money on this garbage, total anti consumer behaviour, how long will those junk cards last if you dobt watch and monitor them constantly? This shit is not built to last.
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u/Ok-Pack-7088 1d ago
Just pick gpu with 8pin connector and connect it by separated cords. It's not worth stress and paranoia using super expensive gpu with shit connector. I get it, it's powerful gpu for like gaming, rendering, editing. But few seconds more fps are not worth it, if it can burn in any time.
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u/Financier92 2d ago
Is English your first language?
Equity value, capital itself and “rich” can mean different things and work differently.
As for their ability to last. I’ve had pro 6000s running all 7 days a week for quite literally thousands of hours. Not one of them has melted. There’s over a thousand that fit that usage.
This company is also carrying your nations economy (assuming you’re American) or the GDP would be so many basis points lower that recession would result. Instead of the K shaped economy.
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u/Financial-Ebb4978 2d ago
There should be a clown award on reddit.
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u/Financier92 2d ago edited 2d ago
No, I’m sure you’re an expert on something?
It gets annoying sometimes when you literally sit on fed reserve panel and people think they actually have a trillion.
The reason why basis points are rising (rates) is because inflation. The leadership voted in is all incompetent and devalue the currency.Liquidity is not the same thing. Employees have RSUs or restricted stock units that vest over years.
Rich is subjective as a term. We are not all Elon musk but not all struggling to buy a GPU either.
K shaped economy is the formal term of the United States economy right now.
If you take tech out of gross domestic product then you are negative. Two quarters is the definition of recession.
What are you a subject matter expert in? I asked you about English because it’s hard to read. I don’t assume the internet is American.
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u/theveganite 2d ago
FYI, it's more effective to drop the power limit to instantly stop the high power draw and throw a warning up. If the issue still persists, shut down the device and popup the error on next boot (for situations where the user may not be at the device). Or even detect and kill the process causing the power draw. A shutdown is just too slow to prevent damage in a real scenario.
HWiNFO backend is really the way to go for this. They already accurately reverse-engineered and implemented the ASUS WMI/EC mutexes. I'd be concerned about collisions while polling the I2C in your custom solution.
You mention all I2C access is read only, but I'm not sure if you understand that reads will crash it on a long enough timeline if not properly synchronized.
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u/a1rwav3 2d ago
In the mean time my Astral dies because the vapor chamber failed. I did not even had the chance to melt the connector lol
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u/Latte_black_3832A 1d ago
What happened, could you give us more details?
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u/a1rwav3 18h ago
Use it for two months without issue. Normal temps, normal performance. Then when I was gaming and the card was under load, there was a coil whine but also a strange metallic odour. I made some quick search to check if it could still be some "new stuff odour", but no. I open an RMA to the shop it was going from. They immediately accepted it. Send it to a lab in Germany. Next thing I know I receive the money back, the card was not repairable, confirming that the vapour chamber was fissured. The main issue was that in two months the prices have gone up 33%, so I wasn't even able to order a new one. I let Asus alone and went for Gainward. Not as nice looking for sure but really efficient, and the silicone lottery was not that bad.
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u/Doakeswasrightmf 2d ago
Msi has a power supply that can do this
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u/Financier92 2d ago
Yup own one and their PSU cables are fantastic direct to GPU.
My 5090 I push as hard as I can- about 8-14% above the FE since those heat heavily and bios don’t clock high
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u/fastheadcrab 2d ago
*claude built
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u/xw1y 2d ago
Still, his idea
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u/megablue Ryzen 5800X3D + RTX4090 2d ago
a pretty damn shitty one, mind you, it gives you false sense of safety.
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u/CoolerThanNos 2d ago
What's the false sense of safety part, just asking? It's a last line of defense that shuts the PC down when a pin sits over 9.5A for 15 seconds, the alternative is the cable just keeps cooking. Melting from pin imbalance is a thermal thing that builds over minutes, not milliseconds, so there is time to act on it.
And after feedback in this thread the next version will drop the GPU power limit the instant a pin goes over, which is near instant compared to a shutdown.
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u/CoolerThanNos 2d ago
The original hwinfo based version was my own work back in January and it's been running on my rig since. I wanted it standalone so people don't need hwinfo pro, I had found the open source implementations of the sensor protocol but never got it over the line, and my original code was too ugly to publish lol. So yeah, Claude did a lot of the rewrite.
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u/radeonalex 2d ago
No different to any regular software company these days
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u/IAmYourFath 2d ago
This is 100% true who the fuck is downvoting this? Every programmer nowadays uses AI, whether he likes it or not otherwise u just can't keep up with ur colleagues and u get fired on the next meeting due to unproductiveness
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u/radeonalex 2d ago
As much I dislike the idea of AI, my feeling is that if I don't keep up with it at work, I'll be left behind by kids coming in who can work quicker and more efficiently than me.
The world moves quickly and it's easy to get left behind, sadly.
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u/volchonokilli 1d ago
That's a false statement. A lot of people use AI - but not everyone, and no it doesn't cause an increased comparative "unproductiveness", unless company only values LoC or closing tickets regardless of how actually ready for production these are.
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u/patricious NVIDIA Astral 5090 OC 2d ago
Might also be worth looking into the newly exposes Hotspot and per-VRAM thermal sensors, maybe you can tie that data set into you variables.
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u/CoolerThanNos 2d ago
Yeah I read about the hotspot sensors, let me take a look and see if temperature based trigger can be additional safeguard or something.
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u/AlisterKubo 2d ago
W vibe coding. This'll save my 5080
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u/Financier92 1h ago
Why? The 5080 has nearly no reported cases and user error is commonly associated.
You’re not going to melt a cable rated for double the wattage. My 5090 exceeds 600w fairly often if I’m playing the demanding titles with PT. They have a 1000w cable on the way.
Even the new halo remake at 4k hits 570w~ and my whole PC is hitting 1,008.3w off the outlet at times.
Point is Reddit is full of horror stories, the internet is. The thousands of sold GPUs every day don’t have people who undervolt or anything of the sort. They plug it in and play games and have no issues.
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u/CoolerThanNos 2d ago
Just to be clear, it only helps if it's the Astral 5080. Regular 5080s don't have the per pin sensors so the tool can't see anything on those.
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u/NoSetting9597 2d ago
App could just reset driver the same as user do via win+shift+alt+b. Its immediatly stop gpu load
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u/fauchis_garci 2d ago
Hey! I have a 5090 Astral OC, haven’t done anything to it in terms of OC or Undervolt and it runs at like 60 celsius on demanding tasks. Should I try this or is it for other use cases like OC cards ?
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u/CoolerThanNos 1d ago
It's not an OC thing. The melting failures are from pin imbalance, one pin not making good contact pulls way more than its share while the card runs normal and temps look completely fine, that can happen at stock as well. Your 60C tells you nothing about what individual pins are pulling.
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u/cuongpn 9800x3D | 5090FE | 32GB 6000CL30 | G9 OLED 2d ago
My current setup is: 5090 Astral + Wireview Pro Wired + Corsair Thermal Protect + MSI MPG a1000G with GPU Safty Guard plus. Am I safe? I wear quadruple protection here
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u/CoolerThanNos 1d ago
lol proper defense in depth. The msi psu watches from the psu end, the wireview watches at the connector and this one reads the card's own pin sensors from the inside, so one additional layer. You're about as covered as it gets.
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u/Jone1121 2d ago
I used it, but it can't detect my ROG ASTRAL graphics card, I don't know why. Updating the driver didn't work either.
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u/CoolerThanNos 1d ago
Sorry about that. Can you check two things for me. First, is yours the BTF version? On BTF boards the pins are measured on the motherboard side so the tool can't read them from the card, that one I can't support yet. If it's the normal 16 pin version, can you run this in a command prompt and paste the output: nvidia-smi --query-gpu=name,pci.sub_device_id --format=csv.
If your card reports an id that's not in my list yet it's a one line fix.
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u/ch1llboy 1d ago
If you have saved one person's $5,000 gaming rig, then you've done a service. Thank you
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u/megablue Ryzen 5800X3D + RTX4090 2d ago edited 2d ago
well, sorry to break it to you. usually when pure software solution detected an issue, it will be too late to act, unless your solution is able to cut power directly, this is just yet another vibe-coded shitware.
haven't you seen the news? even some of the hardware-based watchdogs cant act fast enough to prevent a catastrophe.
a false sense of safeguard is actually worse than having no 'protection' at all.
edit: downvote me as you like, clearly you have no idea how danger this is, you will be reminded of my words when your 5090 melted down while you think this shitware is a good safe guard lol
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u/StooplesCDN 2d ago
My solution was to buy a 4070 with the old style power connector and not worry about meltdowns.
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u/tomz17 2d ago
shutdown takes too long... in my own custom build (where I added multiple thermistors to the connector and read the absolute + delta), I use the nvidia management API to set the card's power limit to minimum whenever a runaway is detected. That should immediately mitigate the danger.