The Curious Case of the 12-pin Power Connector: It's Real and Coming with NVIDIA Ampere GPUs

[axipher]

The new NVIDIA 12-pin connector has six 12 V and six ground pins. Its designers specify higher quality contacts both on the male and female ends, which can handle higher current than the pins on 8-pin/6-pin PCIe power connectors. Depending on the PSU vendor, the 12-pin connector can even split in the middle into two 6-pin, and could be marketed as "6+6 pin." The point of contact between the two 6-pin halves are kept leveled so they align seamlessly.

 

 

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[ENTERPRISE]

Well as long as they provide the necessary adaptors (2x Pin to 12 Pin) when you buy the GPU then that is OK. I mean they generally do but as nobody is going to have a compatible PSU from the get go, they kind of have to lol.

 

Curious though, I would like to see what sort of improvements these "Higher quality contacts" actually bring over the regular ones.

[axipher]

Let's just bump the main power rail up to 24 VDC.

[ENTERPRISE]

I will be straight up with this, if they released the GPU with a new connector and no adaptors...I am not getting it. No way am I tearing out my perfectly good PSU just because Nvidia came up with a new connector. While this is still up in the air at the moment as to how Nvidia is going about this, some news outlets say that there wont be an adaptor as that negates the point of the new connector, not to mention that apparently it has a different pin-out configuration.

 

So this begs the question are we going to see "Nvidia Ampere Ready" PSU's in the future ? Considering that we have had no leaks on that specifically, I cannot see this happening.

 

Will have to wait and see how they go about this.

[schuck6566]

I ran across this in the comments in the article and just had to laugh 'cause it was true... "Funny how when AMD has a power hungry GPU every one thinks power consumption is everything but when Nvidia hints at an upcoming power hungry atrocity everyone's cool with it."