KINGPIN Says a Connector Dispute With NVIDIA Derailed EVGA's Last Flagship Card

What happened

KINGPIN Says a Connector Dispute With NVIDIA Derailed EVGA's Last Flagship Card, according to TechPowerUp. Vince "KINGPIN" Lucido has blamed NVIDIA for the troubled launch of the EVGA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti KINGPIN, the last graphics card to carry his name. In the first video on his new Overclocking Kingpin YouTube channel, the overclocker said he wanted the card to have two 12VHPWR power connectors, while NVIDIA wanted it limited to just one. NVIDIA is a semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, and its products and services include graphics processing units.

The disagreement, in his words, "really screwed up the production timeline", and he also holds it responsible for how few units were made afterward. The card did eventually ship with both 16-pin connectors when it went on sale for $2,500 with a bundled 1600 W power supply, about three months after the RTX 3090 Ti itself came out.

This is only Lucido's side of the story, and it isn't clear why NVIDIA pushed for a single connector. In September 2022, EVGA ended its partnership with NVIDIA and stopped making graphics cards, with CEO Andrew Han pointing to a souring relationship between the two companies.