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Nvidia’s 12VHPWR power connector, later updated to the 12V-2×6 format, has been at the centre of controversy since it first appeared on certain GeForce RTX 30-series cards four years ago. Now there’s a new chapter in its history, as MSI has become the first PSU manufacturer to all but abandon the evergreen 8-pin power connector in its latest top-end power supply units.
Over the years, the power demands of a gaming PC have steadily increased and power supply units have followed suit by offering additional sockets for all the extra cables needed. Take any modern PSU and you’ll see multiple sockets for powering the CPU, motherboard, drives, and of course, the graphics card.
In the case of the latter, one typically gets two or three 8-pin sockets. Take the Corsair RM750X, as an example. It has two connectors for driving a graphics card, next to those for the CPU. Nothing unusual about that whatsoever and it’s pretty much the norm. However, as reported by Overclock3D, MSI’s new MPG A1000GS and MPG A1250GS PSUs only sport one 8-pin socket.
You may well ask why would MSI do this. Let me be clear right now: this isn’t a move against AMD, which has many graphics cards that require two 8-pin power cables, but it’s instead more of a move towards… yes, you’ve guessed it… AI.
The reason why those two new PSUs only have one 8-pin connector is because they both sport two 12V-2×6 sockets instead. The company does offer PSUs with up to three 8-pin and one 16-pin power slots.
The only reason why anyone would want to use two 12V-2×6 cables is to have a PC with two Nvidia graphics cards but given that SLI is dead and long gone on the latest generation of GeForce GPUs, dual setups are purely for AI, to let you do your own training and inference.
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One could argue that all of this is a nothing burger, as the PSU market is chock-full of different manufacturers and models, and there is no shortage of PSUs with two or three 8-pin connectors. However, it does make me wonder just how much longer the ol’ 8-pinner will stick around.
While the 12VHPWR/12V-2×6 has questionable margins of safety when operating at its maximum rated current load, the dinky connector is absolutely fine when dealing with power demands of, say, 300 W or so. I personally find the design to be much easier to use than the traditional 8-pin but that’s purely because I’m constantly swapping graphics cards around on a near-daily basis, so I’m hardly representative of the whole PC gaming market.
However, from a system manufacturer’s perspective, using a single 16-pin cable is more agreeable than having two use up to three 8-pin ones. I know we’re talking mere cents and minutes here, in terms of cost and fitting time, but when you’re churning out thousands of PCs on a regular basis, it all adds up.
And that’s why I wonder how long it’ll be before OEM/SI companies put enough pressure on AMD and Intel (and Nvidia for its mainstream cards) to switch to the PCI group-ratified power connector for every graphics card.
We hardly ever see Molex connectors used in a new PC build these days so it’s not like older designs always stick around. Fortunately, the PSU market is so competitive, that I suspect that we’ll still be able to purchase three 8-pin socket units for at least another ten years.
But it looks like MSI is happy to start the transition now, at least for a few, niche power supplies.
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Kurt Indovina
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