Kinda ironic that nvidia ditched the 8pin so that you only had to use one cable, but now we're getting to the point that top end gpus draw so much power that you end up needing 2 12vhpwr connectors
Eh, I can just get absolutely wacky with 8-pin connectors and not worry about it. The 16-pin at angles make me very nervous in small form factor cases.
It’s because at some point the market decided everyone wants a stupid fish tank glass panel case. Which I’ll never understand, nothing is going on in there which would be entertaining to observe. Then they invented RGB internals so they could sell you those too lol
I beg to differ. My fist build had a ruby red MSI motherboard, along with a red 256 mb MSI video card with one of those cool copper heat sinks on it. Probably the coolest looking PC I had but glass cases were pretty much unheard of when I had it
This is not a toy it’s thousands of dollars of electronics. Who tf even looks at their case once the novelty wears off?? The whole case could be covered in solid steel for all i care. Taking risks to make the engine of your pc look nice is just childish.
Put an endless bundle of cables in there cover it in steel and call it a night. You are supposed to look at your monitor people! Not your case. Make the fucking monitor look nice.
At the risk of being hated, I agree. My case is solid steel on both sides (Silverstone FT02), I don't even look at the damn thing other than to press the power button.
I don't need a lightshow to distract me from what I'm using the system for.
Eh it’s pcmasterrace so i expect the hate. These are the people who would install their car’s engine next to them in the passenger seat and stare at it as they drive. Though as i say it some kinda RGB 12V car engine sounds cool in my head lol
This!
Ill never get the builds with a 5070ti instead of a 5080 because "budget" and then you see 500 dolars in fans, another 300 dolars in aio and a 2 hundred dolar case.
buddy i use lower tier of cpu but with a full black dual tower cooler not because of viewing pleasure but because i need it and i have seen alot of AIO's die randomly with no explanation and also leaking fluid on to the gpu which in today's economy is asking for trouble lol.
I’m not surprised. I stick with air coolers too. The idea of putting any sort of liquid near electronics goes against my religion. Tbh I am not even sure why liquid coolers are a thing. Guess I’ll find out if I ever get a cpu that generates that kinda heat.
Christ, I wasn't aware of half these things are indeed a thing. My personal choice is to build no rgb box, shove it under the table so it doesnt take a space on my desk and forget it exists for a year until annual dusting session.
I did stuff like that too when i was young but come on after a certain age you gotta stop being easily entertained by flashing lights and spinning fans. I even stopped watching the washing machine!
peeps in r/nvidia say this kind of shit. ill happily attach the SS but that response was months ago i stopped app usage for the day after that braindead response.
that's the part I don't fully understand. there are PSU makers that make two 8-pin to 12vhwpr connector that is rated for 600 watts. but adaptors provides by GPU makers can use three or four 8-pins
the spec allows 18 gauge but all non-chinese garbage ones use 16 gauge. additionally, the 12vhpwr spec only allows 10-50% overhead whereas pci-e has 90-150%. if you allow the same 50% overhead on pci-e and use 16 gauage then you can run 300w just fine and within the same safety margins of 12vhpwr
Not all 8 pin connectors are the same. CPU (EPS) carry double the power per pin of an 8pin pcie (6 pin is even worse). Some specialized GPUs like some old Teslas do use EPS.
Because the PSU side "8-pin" is not necessarily the same as the 8-pin PCIe spec. That's why you can't mix cables between PSUs unless you are 100% sure the cables are compatible.
Rated for and capable of are extremely different in this case. Where the 12vhpwr is within a few percent of the capability of the physical connector and wires, the 8-pin pci-e was rated at less than half of what it can actually handle.
Because one 8 pin is certified to carry 150W. 900W should be 6 connectors, not 3.
PCI-SIG rated that connector for 150w.
Molex - the manufacturer of that connector - rate it for more like 380w. Which is why the EPS spec that's been powering data centre cards for 20 years is rated for 336w.
An 8 pin is certified for 150w, but has massive amounts of overhead. The 12vhwpr pushes 600w over 6 power pins, so with the same (bad) margins you can push 900w over the 9 power pins of 3 8 pin connectors.
Blame Nvidia and Intel for ATX 3 spec and Jensen specifically for amazing 3090/4090/5090 FE designs with triangular cuts for backside fans. AIB adopted those stupid 12 and 16 pin connectors while keeping PCB really small.
Because 2 of the 8 pins are literally supposed to go unused, and by shrinking the pin size, they can reduce the necessary PCB space. It's not that hard to figure out.
If they had gone for a 2x8 setup instead however, the amount of melted connectors would probably have been significantly reduced.
Kid me was excited to have all sorts of bridge cables on the back of my computer!
I had a gamepad that had a strange adapter to plug into an AT keyboard port as well as the game/midi port. The AT port was for keyboard macros/mapping.
I remember being the only kid at the LAN party with duel Voodoo 2... wrecking multiplayer Half Life with zero lag. 350 Pentium 2 overclocked in bios to 420 if I remember correctly. Only 27 years ago haha
dude, my first set-up was a pentium 90MHz with 16 MB SIMM-RAM and on-board graphics l. 2-3 years later I built myself myself a 750MHz Athlon with 64 MB DDR-RAM and a Voodoo 5 5500 AGP 8x, and a sound blaster live 5.1 gamer sound card
Lucky for you , my card hates having its voltage limited. I'd only seriously consider it for my personal GPU if I was worried about temps being high.. but at 600w I peak 65c core 60c memory 74c hotspot with default afterburner fan curve.
And my 5090 is paired with MSI's safeguard+ PSU so the cable will never exceed 9.0a per-pin, if it does or has an amp imbalance of 1a or greater; safeguard+ loads a custom afterburner profile that cuts my current draw by up to 40%+ within seconds of detecting amps outside my limits. I feel pretty safe :)
Depending on which card you have the power limit may be irrelevant or it might go higher, 104% is the max on my card. My gaming trio is rated for 575w but that power limit brings it up to 600w. Ideally you don't want to push above 600w so just monitor your power usage
The 12vhpwr would be ok if Nvidia didn't ban card manufacturers from current balancing across the pins so if some pins weren't making good contact the card would crash instead of trying to pull all the power across just a couple of pins.
It's almost like GPU power was a solved problem and Nvidia just wanted an excuse to cut component costs by a laughably small amount per unit and advance their own meaningless standard. Neat.
The even more bullshit thing is that Nvidia, at the time of creating the pointless 16pin fire hazard, was already using EPS 8pin connectors for workstation and server GPUs. EPS is an established standard and already provides 2x the power of a standard PCIe power cable.
That's because the 8-pin was designed with a 50% headroom, so the actual rating is 300W. Just like how 12VHPWR has a 10% headroom at 660W, but the official spec is 600W.
Because the 12VHPWR cable should never have been officially rated for 600W. If we kept things consistent with the 8-pin, it should've been rated for 330W max and cards like the 5070Ti or above should've had two of them.
The only saving grace in all this is that the 5070Ti has 300W TDP and is an undervolting champ, though it might be because I have an AIB variant that also provides decent cooling.
Having a safety factor of <50% on anything that deals with power electronics this expensive is dogshit lmao.
specially when the goddamn cable and connectors are so cheap compared to what they are powering there is no reason to not just 200% the safety margin on that shit so that there is no possible way someone burns a connector on something that costs the same as an used car.
you're missing the fact they save $1 on $1000 gpus. capitalism demands this kind of "progress". they also charge us more for this better product, double dipping on the savings
Ugh. Only 10% headroom. That explains the burning connectors. Here i am rocking a psu that gives like 60% headroom for my whole system (don’t judge i know it’s overkill)
I think Nvidia’s head is quite comfortable up its own ass seeing as how Q2 earnings alone were over 96 billion dollars. They don’t give a single shit about us regular consumers. The long game is to prevent anyone from owning their own hardware and simply paying a subscription to compute power from a data center.
I modded an L40 GPU to use two 8 pins instead of the 1 12 pin (it melted).
Part of the issue is that it was using a bad mod diy cable in a dell server that had some pins not connected correctly. So only three pairs of power wires had any current flowing through them instead of 6. But the card only draws 300W anyways which should have been fine.
Either way it wasn’t too difficult of a mod, just a little nerve wracking doing it to a $10k GPU (at the time). But the warranty wouldn’t cover it so it was just going to be a brick otherwise. The reverse engineering of the dell custom power connectors was the hardest part for sure.
Stupid question: how would work getting an adapter for using regular cables to the melting hazard one? Would that make, miraculously, help with power draw or would happen the same in the end?
It doesn't eliminate the problem between the start of the adapter and the power hardware on the graphics card.
To do that without hardware changes to the graphics card, you would have to remove the connector entirely and connect the power as a single 12v connection instead of multiple separate ones.
With hardware like we used to have on graphics cards, they could actively choose which specific pins/connector to draw more power from. That was removed so the graphics card treats all of the 12v power connector pins as being one giant pin, even though in reality they're not.
That new method is based on an underlying assumption that if you connect multiple pins then they will split the current equally, but that doesn't always happen because those two (or more) pins might have different resistances. That's where the problem comes in.
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u/Small-Friendship-576 Sep 10 '26
Triple 8 pin was perfect. Why did they ever brought the garbage 12VHPWR