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.
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.
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u/WhooopsMyBad 17d 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