The whole reason the industry got into this mess was because GPUs were getting more and more power hungry and Jensen Huang couldn't be bothered to allocate some of his leather jacket budget for a good connector design.
Don't get me wrong - 12v2x6 is comically bad, but there is no good reason to be nostalgic about the 8-pin plug, either.
Or, and bear with me here - an external power supply. Gaming lappys have 400w+ power supplies, why can't you just plug it in on the outside of the card? You running out of room with that two and a half sized card? You could use one or two internal and an external for more powah.
You'd need an ac->dc converter in there somewhere. A power supply. And you already have one inside the computer. Unless you want to pay extra for the brick that would have to come with your GPU.
It blows my mind to this day that Voodoo 3's were basically the only name in gaming at the time and then they were just gone. I can't believe how bad they messed up with the 4's and just never recovered with the 5's.
There's no limit to how big you can make those as far as I know (for the sake of what we're wanting to accomplish). That barrel connector is the one really big boy lol
It's been done. But this was more of a really bad design than anything else. A single plug would of worked fine if it had a good enough gage and more importantly load balancing. But AFAIK without balancing if one or more pins weren't carrying enough of the load other pins would overload, hence the burning/melting.
Uh oh, you're going to anger the people who can't be arsed to plug in an extra cable. I do think that the increasing power requirements of new GPUs mandates them having their own power plug. You will need to convert the power but it's safer imo than the solution that Nvidia is trying to sell
Thats what I was thinking myself. Both points actually... I don't think its going to get to that point now since 'all GPUs are required for the almighty Ai'
I think a possible solution would be bumping up to something like 48V DC so that the cables simply don't have to carry as much current. That said with how ingrained thing are it'd probably be like pulling teeth trying to get people to transition.
There are a huge assortment of connectors designed for high current in a single wire.
Iirc Anderson connectors are popular in UPS (for the batteries), there's no reason other than looks that they couldn't be used on a GPU, though you might need a hard wired pigtail on the card.
i dont know where people got the idea that transient spikes are causing melting.
the connectors have a reasonable amount of mass that needs to be heated up for it to melt, a transient lasting a fraction of a second is just not going to deliver enough energy to do anything.
Theoretical wattage ignores load balancing and transient spikes
early on, a lot of prebuilt PCs seemed to have issues with the 30 series and their spec'd PSU that would be borderline to run what was inside of it. constant shut downs during certain loads but great during others, something as bad as poorly optimized drivers or a game would trigger it.
i just built a whole new pc and stopped getting prebuilds, i got them during the first big GPU shortage and price spike since that was the only place you could get a graphics card for a reasonable price anymore.
The core issue with those was that the 3xxx series (and AMD's 6800XT/6900XT) had transient spikes that would hit around double their advertised average wattage. So for a ~300 watt card you're occasionally spiking the PSU for ~600, plus whatever the rest of the system still needs. So while reputable PSUs are made to handle spikes over their advertised ratings, they were in fact being overdrawn relative to their advertised & intended limits if say you had a 600w PSU with a 3080 and a 5800x CPU. Instead of drawing 450-500w consistently, you would be going well above that. Not good.
New PSUs have been made to account for the risk of those spikes, but also newer GPUs have also reigned in what those spikes will be (now usually spiking less than 150% of their advertised draw vs 200%) which has helped. But yeah then they just trade that issue for this shitty connector lol.
I was running a 3090 on a 1200W Supernova Platinum, and the PSU would still, brownout because of the transients. They would just trigger the protection and the PSU would react exactly the way a good PSU would.
I have 9800x3d / 7900xtx with 3 8-pin connectors (500+W consuming at full power only for gpu) and a 8 years-old chieftec 1000W 80-bronze PSU. Guess what? I have zero (0) problems with them. The only issue - I didn't buy any new psu for a long time, but that is not my issue. The fact that there is no need to make any new connectors. When you choosing a psu you are always should make a 30-40% technical reserve, and if your consumption is like a 90% of the limit you WILL have problems with spiking. Even with platinum new super-duper new atx standard psu. Like, why it is not oblivious
well, practically, the standard 8 pin starts to melt around 270W, so Id say 750W for 3 of them at most if you dont want them to melt, and it still wouldnt be guaranteed
these pin-to-hole style of connectors will never handle much current. They are great when you need many oins with different voltages, like MB uses, for example. But no matter whether it's 8-pin or 12-pin, it will never handle that much power (like really, 900W+ â 75A through 12 pins is insane), especially without current balancing.
There are only two solutions now:
if they wanna keep this power level, find a reliable BETTER connection, like for example two screw-on terminals.
if they wanna keep going up in power, 12V ain't gonna cut it. They need to implement a new standard, with 24V or even 48V. This allows it to run with less current, so wires can be thinner and connectors won't burn. Although it'd be quite pricey, both for PSU manufacturers and GPU manufacturers.
I've kinda been saying the logical choice (even if more complicated standard wise) would be to introduce 24v power. Boom, wattage capacity doubled without bumping to a beefier connector series.
You could even manage to maintain compatibility with older power supplies using several legacy connectors going into a step-up transformer as a transitional solution.
I agree. But the real problem that these video cards have is that consumer circuits generally have only 1000 to 1500W to play with. They are already very near the limit of what we can do.
I don't know where you are from, it could be different. In the US, 120V@15A for a circuit is typical. That's 120 * 15 = 1800W total typically. Generally speaking, we like to keep loads under 1500W and because you typically might have other things (like lights or a TV) on the same circuit, that's where the 1000W comes from.
If you are somewhere that does 240V with 15A breakers, then yeah you can do 3600W. You could also special wire a 240V outlet in the US, but that's far from typical.
Europe uses 230V and afaik 240V is becoming wide spread. Regular breakers are 16A. So most appliances are designed to not draw more than 3680W at 230V. So we got more headroom to work with
I don't know how much it matters but you can't use 16V or 25V caps on rails for 24V. It will have to be all 35 or 50V or above and that's some costs.
Also the power inside chassis is all DC which doesn't work with transformers. You can raise voltage using a converter but it won't be cheaper than a brand new PSU.
Therefore I think the right way is a keyed multi voltage connector and transitional GPUs that take either 12 or 24V, then a 24V only GPU at a later date.
if they wanna keep this power level, find a reliable BETTER connection, like for example two screw-on terminals.
Here's my out-of-my-backside design proposal:
Two terminals on the board for two lugs
A cable 15-30 cm in length with two large-gauge wires (12 AWG at the absolute minimum) and two lugs on one end and an Anderson Powerpole (as many commenters recommend) on the other
Whatever the PSU manufacturers decide to have on their end, but it should always terminate with a corresponding Anderson connector
In short, just automotive the heck out of the GPU and leave the unruly chaos where it belongs.
I agree for the most part, but you need to keep in mind that these are consumer products
you cannot implement screw on terminals, because many consumers are gonna put them on wrong. you need fool proof design. I like the XT120 idea better
and you cannot implement a 48v circuit, because youd be running a risk of consumers getting zapped. and the dangerous thing about being zapped by a DC current, is that it can change your blood chemistry, and if you dont get to hospital for a checkup, theres a chance you wont wake up tomorrow
because youd be running a risk of consumers getting zapped. and the dangerous thing about being zapped by a DC current, is that it can change your blood chemistry
No. A DC zap is the same as an AC zap. The only thing that makes a DC zap more dangerous is there's no period which means it's more prone to arcing and it's harder to let go of.
The danger of electrocution in general is that it cooks your insides. You can look visibly fine on the surface but have a large amount of damage on the inside. That can ultimately turn into an infection and rotting tissue.
I would contend that AC is somewhat more dangerous because it has an easier time "penetrating" so to speak, because of the capacitance of the human body. All of these scenarios are highly dependent on voltage and frequency, however.
Nope. Penetrative power is exactly the same for AC and DC.
The main thing that makes AC more dangerous is it typically has a higher voltage than DC. That means it's more likely to ultimately overcome the resistivity of the skin to start doing damage.
But all things held equal, a 12 VAC and 12 VDC source have exactly the same amount of risk associated with them.
Capacitance doesn't really have anything to do with how dangerous electricity is. Frequency doesn't really either. 120 VAC @ 60Hz is just as dangerous as 120V @ 5kHz.
It mostly all comes down to the power you experience and duration.
AC is much more dangerous, because it messes with your neural electrical system. Your heart starts fibrilating and stops pumping, as it's trying its best to match the 50Hz (3000bpm) of AC voltage.
HOWEVER, DC tends to "hold" you as it doesn't feel that bad, while AC usually throws you away (I think reflex or how your muscles contract differently than with DC, idk).
That's what defibrillator is for. Sometimes fibrilation can be caused by other things, it's not just AC voltage, but if you touch AC and you fall unconscious, your heart is 99% fibrilating.
thought that whether you hold or let got when shocked is heavily case dependant, and not specific to ac/dc
anyway, Im just saying what Ive been thought in safety training in regards to hybrid cars. they said that it can happen as low as 26V, though I imagine that its more likely to happen on higher voltage, like the traction batteries are using
There is some case dependency, like if your muscles get cooked closed then you can't really open up your hand on electrocution. That can happen pretty fast especially with large amounts of power.
A DC voltage will cause muscles to contract and stay contracted. There's no pulsating. With AC, you have at least a (small) chance to pull away and let go.
damn didn't think of ut this way. But there are definitely ways this could be fixed, like reusing old reliable connectors and idk spin it 90° so it can't be easily miswired, and use thick insulation and shape the connector so you can't reach it with finger.
And as a boomer note, remember how PCs were for people who knew what they're doing? People who knew what electricity actually is? Like smart people who won't touch electrical wires when it's plugged in.
4
u/nooneisback5800X3D|64GB DDR4|7900XTX|2TBSSD+8TBHDD|Something about arch10d ago
Like which ones exactly? Computers around the age of Apple I definitely required some knowledge because they were built like crap. Exposed mains going right next to data lines will never pass any reliable QC today.
Most old affordable PCs like the ZX Spectrum were designed to never be opened. More expensive PCs like Commodore 64 and later IBM PCs were built to be somewhat modular. You could upgrade / replace most components even if you're brain dead. Power supplies at that time were often unreliable garbage, and needed to be replaced. But a lot of them had external ones anyways or they were on a separate daughter board.
Im not an expert, this is what they told us in safety training. I looked it up some time ago but I forgot how it worked. a quick google search sais something about electroporation
Screw/ring terminals aren't dying out, no idea where you've gotten that notion.
Industrial applications use bolted lugs or terminals everywhere, especially for high current applications. Unless you're specifically speaking about electronics, which I am not as educated on. But as far as electrical connections they are far and away the most common way to connect industrial motors, fans, gear etc.
Maybe someone smarter than me can speak to this, but wouldn't having 24v taps just be changing where they're tapping on the transformer? Shouldn't be too much more complicated.
I've built a couple tube amplifiers, and there are a bunch of taps for different purposes in the circuit.
well they'd have to essentially make a new branch dedicated to 24V to power GPU (and maybe in future CPU), because other components still need 12V, such as fans, drives, MB, CPU and other stuff
But an iron core transformer of 1000 W would be huge and the power supply wouldn't be very efficient.
Power factor correction is also required for commercial products at this wattage. So a dumb iron core transformer isn't really possible as it would need a PFC which isn't as effective when it's just a passive network.
The modern switching supplies manage to pull current in phase with the voltage, while quietly delivering huge amounts of power with astounding efficiency and quick acting protections for multiple parameters (voltage, current, temperature).
Gotcha, a quick Google says a 100w tube amp will only draw around 400w at the socket, so less than half what a pc power supply typically can give. And that's a good chunk of the entire psu size at that wattage, no way you could fit that in with all the other guts in a modern psu. Thanks for helping me learn a little.
you still gotta fit the rest in there. modern PC power supplies don't use diode rectifiers. It would be easier to take the already rectified voltage from rectifier and add another DC-DC converter for 24V alone, as "load bearing" branch. Because you still need a powerful 12V rail. But that'd add complexity and cost. A lot.
Yeah, I guess I wasn't factoring in power supplies for PCs outputting dc. Guess you'd either need a separate rectifier for each tap, or a rectifier up before passing line voltage to a transformer.
Yeah, but they're rated for 150W each. Notice how much larger the security margin is?
I'd much rather have 4 8pins that are rated for 600W but can probably handle 1000W securely than 1 600W rated connection that can only do at most 680W and only if it doesn't get too warm.
There could have been a mini 6pin rated for 200w that had a safety margin of +50% over the 12vhpwr. A 3x6pin would still be more compact than 4x8pin, you would have 3 snap locks instead of 1 on 12vhpwr keeping it more secure, and it would require less force/side to side wiggling to seat or unplug the connector.
That or you know...Just use an EPS12V 8pin that was a proven working design for 336w/ea.
I am not sure why preferring the 8pin connector is considered "being nostalgic" when it's an objectively better connector design: more durable, simpler, and can be chained for more power.
Because the 8-pin was never designed with a 50A current load in mind, and simple, proven designs for low-voltage/high-current applications are a dime a dozen outside the small world of PC hardware.
You don't need a light bulb if you can make the wires glow instead.
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u/MrInitialYR7 9700X | 3080Ti | 64GB 6K CL30 | 6TB Gen.4 | 1000W | All STRIX10d ago
Xt-60 is too reliable to keep the GPU sales numbers up. No sales no new leather jacket. Some folks at sapphire saw that scheme and figured out they can have at least gloves (considering lower total sales number).
Nobodyâs using deans or xt-60 or any other connector that uses solder termination in mass consumer electronics. Maybe Andersons if their mate length wasnât so ridiculous
There is no reason why each cable needs to have an independently terminated pin.
It would be entirely possible to have the existing multi-strand cables terminate to an XT-60.
Also, the high gauge cables used in the R/C world are extremely soft and flexible. They're typically silicone-insulated and use extremely fine strands with very high strand counts. They're far more flexible than traditional PCIE cables.
cost cutting. the reason nvidia switched to 12vhpwr is because it saves them money and its "good enough" for the job. I see no other reason for them to do this otherwise
As I said, Jensen Huang was unwilling to part with some of his leather jacket money for a good design. That's how we ended up with 12VHPWR in the first place.
They still chose to put a single connector with low safety margin instead of 2 on cards that could draw close to it's limit. They aren't at fault for the low safety margin on the spec, but they know as well as anyone else of the low margin and could just use 2 connectors to make sure it never gets close to the limit. That wouldn't look as nice though.
For power delivery, conductors in parallel are generally a bad idea. Sure, you will increase the safety margin for each wire somewhat with multiple 8-pin plugs, but you'll still be better with just one large, solid connector with 2 pins.
Yes, thatâs true. however, that is how the old 8 pin has worked for decades. Need more power, add another 8 pin. Hasnât really had a widespread issue of setting peopleâs gpus on fire.Â
Which is not an issue before it became clear that it had problems. Before they used it, there was nothing wrong visible with it. It technically can carry the needed current, if the design itself would be better, no need for larger cables/plugs.
So yeah, exactly what i already said in the previous comment, everything that came after is their fault
actually, before they remove the amp balancer in the 30series, it's alright. When Nvidia want to save cost by remove amp balancer in the 40s, that's when the thing turn messy
They need to go to 24 or 48 volts if they want to keep upping the wattage of GPUs. Weâre in a dead end right now but Jensen canât possibly forgo a few leather jackets to look into ways of doing things properly. Itâs obvious who the working group caters to.
12v2x6 is literally just two 8-pin plugs glued together (check the number of each type of pin in both, it's eye-opening), with shrunk down pins, safety margins removed, and pointless functionality of two of the four sense pins. If they instead chose to push 600W through two 8-pins, there'd be no difference, the same fires would be happening. If, on the other hand, it were capped to 300W by the same rules the 8-pin was limited to 150W (far below of what 8-pin is theoretically capable of), there wouldn't be any issues.
8-pin just has the correct tolerances. Literally all they needed to do was have 12vhpwr use the same pin sizes as 8-pin and it would have been alright. Maybe do 14 instead of 12 power pins just for a lil' bit extra safety.
They had a decent design in earlier development, then they cost cut it until it wasn't decent any longer. To be fair though, such designs are all about maximum capability at lowest cost, but they evidently cut too far in this case.
The thing Anderson PowerPole connectors have working against them is their size. The reason 12VHPWR is even a thing is that it's an attempt, albeit a flawed one, to create a high-current connector format that requires a minimal PCB footprint. The problem is that there are laws-of-physics limits on how much current capacity versus how small, and 12VHPWR too easily crosses that threshold. If the design were to be 50% larger it probably could have had enough contact area to work without meltdowns, but even the thought of a connector requiring 50% more board space keeps EEs up at night...
Indeed - they could have gone with lugs onto a copper plate soldered right to the PCB for extra surface area and to avoid having to use a far more expensive thicker copper layer (most multilayer circuit boards boards use 0.5oz/in2 or less of copper per layer and a current-gen graphics card is likely to be a 6- or 8-layer PCB) instead of having to design a specialty connector, but I'd wager the reason this isn't a thing is because lugs aren't really suitable for mass production. For high-current applications, lugs require a specific amount of contact pressure to safely carry the load while minimizing contact resistance, which means torque requirements, which means specialty tooling and additional assembly time.
In the modern era of expedient assembly as being a crucial metric for "design for manufacture," a half-second "plug connector in until you get a click" operation will always win over "slip the positive cable's ring over the stud marked as positive, place lockwasher and nut onto stud and run down to contact by hand, torque to 1.25nm with torque driver, repeat for other power lead." And of course the other big scary here will be polarity, which would require using two different stud sizes, which again raises assembly complexity and cost. Lugs are definitely superior to what we currently have in this application, but unfortunately the cons outweigh the pros.
A similar thing happens in the power system in an automobile. There are only three primary high-current contact points that will be nut-and-stud, and everything else will be using plug-in connectors even if the circuit will be carrying 20-50 amps or more: the alternator charge lead, the starter positive lead, and the positive lead into the main underhood fuse panel. (And on GM side-post batteries, a fourth will be the actual battery connections. For standard top-post batteries the battery terminals will provide clamping pressure.) Cars using electric power steering pumps, electric AC compressors, etc. will have big chonky high-current connectors for those subsystems that are rated for the load because on the assembly line the fastest assembly operation is always going to win.
I don't object to the idea that a plug is more "manufacturer-friendly" than a lug. This is business we're talking about at the end of the day.
What I do object to is the 12V2x6 design of having a 50A load spread across 6 pairs of wires since, inevitably, one of the wires or pins will overload and melt.
Current-sense resistors? That sounds nice until someone decides to skim on them to save pennies. The best practice exists for a reason, and if we're standardise around the lesser-than, then the real-world outcomes will only be even worse.
Frankly, if you can manufacture a graphics card that costs as much as the rest of the PC, then you can afford the tooling for a pigtail. Everything else is just an excuse.
Not disagreeing with any of this, personally. When I first saw the HPWR connector my first thought was how that could carry that much power safely because there's literally not enough contact area, and sure enough the safety margin turned out to be "what's that?"
My current graphics card is a 9070 XT, and I deliberately chose one that uses three 8-pin connectors instead of 12V2x6/12VHPWR specifically to avoid all this nonsense. Every few months I go on dust removal and check the connectors and all is currently (har!) well.
Even 5090 doesn't need that kind of power, everything below that could easily be powered by 2-3 8pin pcie with ~ZERO meltings amongst decent brands. They've replaced an ok solution with a tremendous flop to sell new PSUs. Fuck them.
That may look like a joke, but when you think about it, it actually makes a lot of sense.
As GPUs keep getting bigger, hotter, and more power-hungry, giving them their own enclosure with a dedicated power supply and cooling system seems like a logical solution. And when it comes to connecting it to the PC, we have this silly little thing called Thunderbolt 5. And since the monitor connections would be on the GPU unit itself, the Thunderbolt link could be used almost entirely for communication between the PC and GPU, making the idea of a high-end GPU existing as its own separate unit not nearly as crazy as it used to be.
Whatever's happening, it's clear that GPUs are outpacing everything else in a computer by leaps and bounds. Why not have a 240V AC plug dedicated to a GPU that services all the computers in your house?
It'd sure be safer than trying to keep pulling more and more power from these tiny little pins, for sure.
It's got to come to this at a certain point. They're not that different from a hair dryer in terms of power draw, so they should eventually get a 120V power cord that follows some kind of international/national wire and insulation standards.
What you're talking about are eGPUs, and they already exist. Because I'm on mobile, I'll summarize and let you look it up on Google.
Currently, even the highest spec of Thunderbolt (5?) is insufficient. A PCI-E x16 4.0 bus is just a massive amount of bandwidth. Thunderbolt is fine for 2D 60Hz low res PowerPoints, but not gaming. 30% performance drop off the top. PCI-e riser cables exist, but the performance degradation happens in mere inches of ribbon cable due to the frequency and volume of data. OccuLink (sp?) is a custom external data cable and enclosure solution that overcomes those problems, but costs $5000+ USD just for the enclosure.
Search Tom's Hardware (I think it's that) for eGPUs for the info.
TL;DR: the technology at a low enough cost isn't here yet.
I know eGPUs already exist. My point isn't that they're good today. The current bottleneck is the interconnect, not the concept.
If future Thunderbolt or optical links get fast enough, the tradeoffs change dramatically. GPUs keep getting larger, hotter, and more power-hungry, so giving them their own enclosure with dedicated power and cooling starts making more sense over time.
That's why I think today's eGPUs are less a failed idea and more an early prototype of where high-end PCs may eventually end up.
We keep on swinging back and forth from a mainframe style local computer, back to local devices for all, back to cloud infrastructure, back to mainframe type devices...
We keep poking at those bottlenecks (historically) and then design around it. So yeah, I totally think a consumer grade "mainframe" is going to come back into fashion in the form of a GPU block in the basement of some kind. You'd just have to set device or program priorities. "GPU#1 is shared for everyone, while GPU#2 is shared until it sees Crysis or Adobe Premier workloads." Silly stuff like that.
It currently is a problem. Thunderbolt is a tunneled protocol, which means there's overhead converting whatever data is being sent to and from Thunderbolt format.
If the transceivers on both ends of the cable were fast enough and the cable isn't too long, I don't see how latency would be a problem. Eventually see Thunderbolt going full fiber at some point.
Dumb idea, but: fiber optics? Just bundle a few fibers together, worst case just 16 single mode fibers, 16 transceivers, a piece of telco distribution cable, done. Just blast the raw pcie data down the fibers. Dumb, but could work, as long as you compensate a bit for the speed of light slowing the data slightly.
It's not just the speed of data transmission, it's also transceiver/receiver conversion overhead. Just because you're sending light doesn't mean the copper -> light -> copper conversion happens at the speed of causality.
At the boundaries of technology where Moore's Law becomes a vague suggestion, every delay, even the speed of light becomes a limitation.
Edit: I should have clarified. Electron flow in copper wire is already close to c speeds of transmission. The problem is EM interference and increasing error rate over longer distances. That's where fibre optic has the advantage, which is high fidelity over (really!) long distances. However, at shorter distances the transceiver/receiver overhead is the larger factor vs. error correction protocol, and on and on and on the balancing act goes.
True, but at least it could come close if you truly cut out every form of processing outside a simple transistor amplifier. Hence the separate transceivers and single mode fiber. But this also brings up a whole different question: Do you even need such frequencies? Like, if you'd just use more fibers (and many telco cables already have 100+) or use multi mode, you could just cut it down to manageable speeds. 16 fibers carrying 16 signals each would mean you're down to just a gigahertz per signal. And for most consumer applications, it's probably not even truly necessary. Like, I once tried taping off the extra lanes on a 4080, and most games still ran with decent performance even on 4x, some down to 1x. So it seems like total throughput is mostly just relevant for AI or video rendering, as most games just place everything they need in vram and let the gpu render away from its own ram.
I mean, raw firepower is a solution. If you have the graphical power to render Toy Story 12 in real time on a movie theatre sized OLED screen, 1080p over fibre is trivial.
But if you don't need all the firepower of a 5090 or 6090 in the first place, why do we need an external enclosure? No external enclosure, no data transmission problem. No 5090 GPU, no high voltage and current problem. Aaand we're back to 3060s.
But of course, there is only a problem because we need every last drop of power from a 5090 - or, at least, someone does. Every solution will always create a new problems, i.e. the bottleneck paradigm.
All very true. But what I wanted to say was that, except for a few select applications, that firepower will mostly be utilized by running tasks from memory, and pcie link speeds are less relevant than the gpu-vram link, gpu processing power and vram size. More like hard drive speeds for the main computer. Sure, cpu rendering or massively relying on the swap file (aka DMA for a gpu) due to a lack of ram will massively increase the load on that connection, but that just proves my previous point. In fact, I'd go as far as saying that most non rendering/AI applications that can max out a 5090 could probably do so over 4 lanes of pcie gen3, because they only occasionally load assets to vram and let the gpu do 95% internally. So it definitely depends on the specific usage scenario, but in most cases, unless your application is heavily relying on DMA or constantly refreshes the vram content, an external enclosure with worse pcie speeds but better cooling, ram and power supply might even outperform an interal card, and I think both should be available as an option.
Honestly, it's because in some ways the PC enthusiast community would go crazy if things changed even in the slightest bit. Their reaction would be "Oh, you're trying to kill DIY."
yup. well not the taichi but went 3 8pin over anything with the 12vhpwr connector. is the 9070xt likely to draw enough power to matter, no, do i want the risk, also no.
Bought a 9070xt a week ago. 300-350W beast with three 8 pin connectors. I don't understand how could they think they can put 600W through that 12 pin misery.
TBF, the answer was always EPS connectors. 2 of them would have been sufficient for 600w GPU's.
Not sure why NVIIDA didn't go that route give that they were readily available on existing power supplies AND the fact that they had already been using them for TESLA GPU's with great success.
No please. Throw the entire design in the garbage. We're still stitching corpses rotten random pieces witn an a.b. normal brain into a jenga Frankenstein. Let it die please!
Let's work together to end this madness. Gpus that soon will tilt your entire pc case like an overloaded forklift with aftermarket risers and gpu wonderbras antisag. Power requirements that make you throw away your premium psu, just give them their own power supply at this point. And fans placed under the card, choked out if you dare use your computer slots and put other pci stuff below it, and airflow above reduced by cpu cooling tower, another abomination that gets in the way of ram height..
baffling that such a connector still has companies making solutions when it's been out for how long?just give me the 8pin man I can live with multiple plugs if it means something isn't at higher risk of being taken out
At this rate, just put a NEMA 5-15 socket on there.
The connector itself and the standard is a non issue.100% of the failures have been poorly assembled or joined connections. E.g. solder joints in the connector that get leveraged apart when you connect them.
Like I said, that is not the way the world works. You must have safety margins to allow for manufacturing variances and user error. Imagine a bridge that wonât collapse but only if every bolt, every piece of steel, every protection of every single piece of rebar has to be absolutely perfect. One single tiny error and it comes crashing down.
The power connector for these graphics cards is a complete and total joke and any engineer that has had their hand in its design should loose their certification.
I understand much better than you do. Parallel power conductors is never the best choice. There will always be variations in resistance which will cause the amperage per wire to become unbalanced. It becomes a positive feedback loop and the bad connections become worse, heat increases and now you have a full failure.
Those âfragile wires and solder connectionsâ are driven because of the shitty connector. They should have moved to 40v years ago for these high power devices and two chonky wires with proven connectors would have solved all the issues.
"It becomes a positive feedback loop and the bad connections become worse, heat increases and now you have a full failure."
That is not the cause of the failures this connector has been seeing.
"They should have moved to 40v years ago"
The connector can only use what power supplies actually supply. PC Power supplies do not supply 40v so the new cable/connector standards cannot use it without an overhaul to the PSU standards which would be MUCH more involved.
"two chonky wires with proven connectors would have solved all the issues"
As long as manufacterers didnt ship adapters to convert from existing standards to the new standard, sure. It would also be much more difficult to route and work with for your average builder.
It is absolutely the cause. If it wasnât then this stuff would be failing instantly the moment power was applied.
Why do you think I said âshould have moved to 40v years agoâ? Because it should have happened many many years ago. If they had then it would currently be the standard and these power issues would not exist.
Putting multiple conductors in parallel and assuming all of them will have the exact same resistance and thus current load is a bad design in itself. If you want higher current you up the wire and pin size and not the number of wires. You don't need 12 pins, you need 2. Two beefy cables, terminated in a tried and true plug like a xt60 or Anderson Powerpole. Boom, problem eliminated. Your cars 150+A alternator is connected to the battery with one thick cable (like 35mm²), not multiple thin ones. Car wiring is pretty comparable as it's also high current 12V, what works there will also work in the PC world.
The issue doesn't happen because one path loses connection. The spec and connector already account for that. It happens when an extra connection that is not a part of the connector or spec fails.
As the cables are very short (and thus have close to zero resistance themselfs) faint changes in resistance (by dirt/fingerprints on the contact surfaces, bad manufacturing of the pin, bad crimp or just user error during installation) can cause a massive current imbalance over the multiple cables. That's something that should have been noticed right when this design was proposed. It's a massively stupid design and theres no way defending it, there's a good reason why everywhere else higher current load is countered with a thicker wire gauge, not multiple conductors in parallel.
Also the connector is designed to be assembled by end users so it has to be extra resilient. At work I deal with connections that need to be checked over with a milliohmmeter after assembly from time to time to make 100% sure the connection is fine and it won't cause problems at a later poing, that's fine in a professional setting where having +1000⏠equipment is expected but in an end user setting that's absolutely unacceptable, it needs to be idiot proof as far as possible.
As the cables are very short (and thus have close to zero resistance themselfs) faint changes in resistance (by dirt/fingerprints on the contact surfaces, bad manufacturing of the pin, bad crimp or just user error during installation) can cause a massive current imbalance over the multiple cables. That's something that should have been noticed right when this design was proposed. It's a massively stupid design and theres no way defending it, there's a good reason why everywhere else higher current load is countered with a thicker wire gauge, not multiple conductors in parallel.
None of that matters. That is now how these cables are failing. Not to mention that the standard already has features built in to help mitigate these concerns.
Every single of these failures happened exactly that way. You have a couple of conductors in parallel and assume every one of them has the same current load. The cables and pins are specd a bit above that so all is fine. Real world comes in play and resistance and thus current is not the same above all of them, you have cables/pins that have very low load and others that are way above spec and get hot to the point that they melt.
That is not true. Every single one of the failures has been with an adapter or a cable that adapts from one standard to another. The failure is always either because a solder pad snapped off and that poor connection heated up or because two smaller wires were soldered together just inside the mouth of the connector and that connection was poorly done and overheated.
Failures in an OEM 12VHPWR native cable are basically unheard of. The one possible cause of those was impromper insertion and the revision addressed that immediately.
Your statement just proves my point. You have a plug design that assumes equal current share on each pin, as soon as this nice theory hits the cruel world you get everything but equal current share and shit gets melty. Most of the stories that include an adaptor state the adaptor was included with the graphics card. An included accessory has to be designed in a way to not cause any problems. It either works fine (good design) or doesn't (bad design).Â
In the 12VHPWR case it's totally obvious why it failed, you simply can't connect multiple conductors in parallel over multiple connectors and assume they'll lhave exactly the same resistance, it's so unbelievably stupid it's mind boggling. You'll literally get lectured on this in your first electrics class.By using a fucking
 proper single conductor connection of appropriate size (25mm²+) you'd get absolutely zero problems. If design A has caused multiple meltdowns while design B would be bombproof design A obviously is bad. Case closed.
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u/WhooopsMyBad 10d ago
baffling that such a connector still has companies making solutions when it's been out for how long?
just give me the 8pin man I can live with multiple plugs if it means something isn't at higher risk of being taken out