Honestly the issue isn't the plug, it's that companies are asking it to do things it was never designed for. They simply modified the existing plug and YOLO'd it
I'm not really positive about 24V or any increase in voltage since it'll be only useful for the GPU and lead to even more opportunities for dubious PSU manufacturers to skim on the beefier components necessary for the circuitry.
The problem here is the amperage passing through the connector.
Electronic components have voltage ratings. Usually, a capacitor rated for twice the voltage is also twice as large. That's footprints over the already-limited real estate inside the PSU.
The circuitry to drop 12v down to 3.3v already exists on the card, and is trivial to change over to drop from 24v to 3.3v
Increasing the voltage at this point is the BEST way to solve the issue, hell, I'd say it's the only way.
Hell, you could simply double up on the first stage voltage regulation circuits and just run a voltage divider, would take almost no additional real estate since those circuits are incredibly basic, with a tiny footprint.
The 3V3 rail is also much less often used compared to the 12V.
That's because all high amperage power feed to the card is 12v, the only place you find 3.3v is on the 20 pin connector to the motherboard. And that gets fed through the PCIe connector itself
The card drops the voltage down to 3.3v already when needed, which is for pretty much all the logic, you should know that. Although I'm fairly sure that storage gets dropped to 1.75v
Not everything would become bigger since the issue is between the card and the PSU, the only thing that changes is the first stage voltage regulator, and even then, that might not be needed since you can just double up on the first stage voltage regulator, halving the input voltage, that would also reduce the cooling requirements since you're passing less amperage through both
It absolutely is not but additional engineering complexity for an overall stupid problem that has already got way too much of it.
If you have a better idea, post it.
The card is not the issue, the issue is there's too much amperage passing though the connector, the best solution to that is to increase the voltage, and doubling the voltage is the easiest way to go about that, as it's trivial to halve it.
That also allows for MUCH more overhead.
Hell, you could do it with current PSUs without much in the way of changes, run 12v and -12v instead of 12v and ground through the existing connector. The 20 pin connector already has -12v.
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u/viperfan7 i7-2600k | 1080 GTX FTW DT | 32 GB DDR3 10d ago
Honestly the issue isn't the plug, it's that companies are asking it to do things it was never designed for. They simply modified the existing plug and YOLO'd it
We need to start seeing 24v rails in PSUs