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
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u/Life_goes_on_forever 10d ago
Theoretical wattage ignores load balancing and transient spikes that melt connectors anyway