Monday, July 3rd 2023
12VHPWR Connector Said to be Replaced by 12V-2x6 Connector
According to Igor's Lab, who has gotten their hands on a PCI-SIG draft engineer change notice, it looks like the not entirely uncontroversial 12VHPWR connector won't be long lived. The PCI-SIG is getting ready to replace it with the 12V-2x6 connector, which will be part of the ATX 3.1 spec and the PCI Express 6.0 spec. The new connector doesn't appear to have any major physical changes though, but there have been mechanical modifications, such as the sense pins having been recessed further back, to make sure a proper contact is made before higher power outputs can be requested by the GPU. The good news is that at least in the draft spec, the 12V-2x6 connector will be backwards compatible with 12VHPWR connectors.
One of the bigger changes, at least when it comes to how much power the new connector can deliver, is that there will be new 150 and 300 Watt modes in addition to the 450 and 600 Watt modes for the sense pin detection. The 12V-2x6 connector is rated for at least 9.2 Amps per pin and the new connectors will carry a H++ logo, with th older 12VHPWR connectors getting a H+ logo. The PCI-SIG has also added stricter requirements when it comes to the cable design and quality, which should hopefully prevent some of the issues the 12VHPWR implementations have suffered from. We should find out more details once the PCI-SIG has finalised the 12V-2x6 connector specification. In the meantime, you can hit up the source link for more technical drawings and details.
Source:
Igor's Lab
One of the bigger changes, at least when it comes to how much power the new connector can deliver, is that there will be new 150 and 300 Watt modes in addition to the 450 and 600 Watt modes for the sense pin detection. The 12V-2x6 connector is rated for at least 9.2 Amps per pin and the new connectors will carry a H++ logo, with th older 12VHPWR connectors getting a H+ logo. The PCI-SIG has also added stricter requirements when it comes to the cable design and quality, which should hopefully prevent some of the issues the 12VHPWR implementations have suffered from. We should find out more details once the PCI-SIG has finalised the 12V-2x6 connector specification. In the meantime, you can hit up the source link for more technical drawings and details.
137 Comments on 12VHPWR Connector Said to be Replaced by 12V-2x6 Connector
Additionally, many things are remarkably similar, as history repeats. Qualifications only teach you the actual technical knowhow, but nothing about the world around it and how it moves, and has always moved. Qualified engineers are nice if you need to actually build something right.
There is one major problem with un(der)qualified experts. Everyone thinks they are an expert these days, but the reality is, the vast majority just isn't smart (note, I think TPU has a rather different demographic), but have the ability to click a few search results and skim through them, missing half the context along the way.
Example. When these things started melting, the playing it down move ('it happens to PCIe pins too so this is fine', yadayada) was straight up armchair expert nonsense, placed against other armchair experts seeing logic in the initial findings. This is where context comes in: the connector is smaller, there is more current, so the headroom for any kind of mismatch / bad contact / whatever else reduces the quality of the connection is going to have a much greater impact. The next hurdle was 'is the user to blame'... I remember the same advocates of the PCIe comparison parrot on about that one. User error, that must be it, so haha you're an idiot and everyone else is better. Today we know the initial impressions of those who just saw things for what they were, were spot on: the plug is a bad engineering job.
It'll always be a difficult question for us... when can we follow our gut, and is it ever wrong? I'll admit the gut isn't always right, but its definitely not baseless. You feel something, it has a reason. The real quest is finding the real reason :)
It's not even using 3-dimple terminals. Though i guess it's fine for a 4070 Ti.
As for powering an RTX 4070 Ti with this cable, it should be fine, most of the RTX 4070 Ti cards are limited to 320 watts max in the BIOS, there are a few that have a max limit of 350 watts though.
I find it funny that (IMO) one of the best brands for automotive spark plugs also was the one company that didn't F-up their pin design.
It's almost like they have experience with spring/friction retention of electrical connections, in imperfect conditions (like an engine bay). :laugh:
The other thing that could be done is an extenstion to the front of the PCI-e slot to give more dedicated power pins so the slot could provide say 150 watts.
I worry about trying to pull 600+ watts on consumer boards just purely due to the extra layers/copper content that would be required. We all complained how DDR5 boards suddenly jumped up $100 due to the tighter restrictions in the signalling. Well trying to pull 600+ watts through the board on top of the CPU power draw will incur more power planes being required and probably a similar jump in pricing again due to the extra layers.
I don't like the idea of this personally.
AGPpro and Apple's custom AGPpro slots did exactly that.
(Server/Industrial board manufacturers inconsistently use an 'extra inline slot' for power too. Usually, for proprietary riser assemblies)
Also it's hilariously ironic how Ngreedia didn't have the "courage" to roll out the latest DisplayPort 2.1 standard on their overpriced $1600 GPU (using outdated DP1.4a ports and pocketing those few pennies), but beta-testing a flammable power connector was perfectly OK.
-48VDC is already a common standard in computing and telecommunications. Though, I'm not sure of the full potential consequences that would come up with an inverted polarity and higher voltage.
(negative voltage rails have been on/off 'a thing' in PCs, but have almost always been fairly low-current)
Funny thought: If they went with 24VDC, I could see tinkerer-makers modding Power Wheelchair chargers into dedicated GPU PSUs. 'The numbers' say that *if the current can be equally-distributed*, there's more than enough 'meat' to the connector for .6KW+. (I think that's what the standard was trying to facilitate, with the sense pins)
OTOH, Real-life (as opposed to 'on-paper') physics tells us this is a very bad idea.
IIRC, this is why it's HIGHLY DISCOURAGED to use multiple wires in 'AWG-equivalency' for both DC in cars and AC in mains wiring. Even with a de-rating, factors come up that can suddenly change resistance on one of the multiple conductors; potentially causing a cascading failure.
None of these cards had the melted connector issue, not even the RTX 3090 Ti that was basically a test run for the RTX 4090.
For some reason someone decided to use the ASTRON female pins in the cable that was supplied with the RTX 4090 cards, those ASTRON pins did not get tested properly to see if they could handle the power draw and make a proper connection with the male pin.
We also got other 3rd parties using this ASTRON female pin and seeing the connectors melting (PSU, CableMod cables, CableMod right angled adapter, cables from Seasonic 8x2 to 12+4 etc).
I will also check my 2-way NVIDIA adapter tomorrow, see how that looks inside. I've been using that ever since i got my 4070 Ti. Initially i was going to go for a CableMod 2x 8-Pin to 12VHPWR cable, but to this day they still don't sell the Pro ModFlex version of that. Only inside the configurator for triple the price. And since they're not using NTK either i decided to get the Seasonic, because pictures i saw looked like it had single-split terminals, but i guess that's not the case after all.
Not sure if NTK has been adopted yet actually.
Google search does not come back with any results of this issue either, and I've not seen any of the major news sites (like this one) carry that news.
Even with that said, where are the melted connectors that use the NTK female pins ? I can not find any reports on the internet for them (RTX 3090 FE, RTX 3090 Ti or RTX 4090) !
More than a couple times, I've had internal DC connections in a PC come loose after AC power failures. Semi-related: I just-yesterday, I had an AC IEC plug/receptacle come loose in a power surge (that also killed the UPS, but not the connected-equipment).
I can't blame my instances completely on thermal-cycling (assuming electromechanical/magnetic forces ???) but you're definitely not crazy.
I wouldn't be surprised if the rapidly-shifting (high moment-to-moment deltas) current consumption of a GPU is part of this 'wiggling out'. IIRC, that's part of the reason these (and other high-current interconnects) use a clip-in/on retention mechanism. Clearly, that mitigation is insufficient in some scenarios.
A variable voltage, for example 12V/24V, is also not something complex to implement. However, PSU manufacturing cost would go up because it would need to supply two voltages, one fixed 12V for the mobo and one variable for the GPU.
A side note ... 12VO for mobos doesn't seem to become mainstream anytime soon but if it ever does, everyone will suddeny discover, surprise surprise, that we actually need more volts there. I don't know but it can't be just universally discouraged. PC connectors have had multiple parallel wires at least since the IBM PC XT (main power was through three +5V and four grounds, other voltages were auxiliary).
De-rating is a thing however, and I am amazed that no one has mentioned it so far. If one contact pin and one wire can carry 12A, six of them in parallel can't carry 72A because you can't guarantee an exact, even distribution of current. So, to give an example, the capacity drops to 6 x 11A. Then there's another obvious reason for de-rating: heat density in connectors. So six pins close together can't carry 6 x 11A but only 6 x 9A if the connector is expected to operate at up to, say, 60°C ambient temperature.
Here's an example from Molex's documents for Micro-fit pins (I'm not sure if the 12+4-pin PCIe connector counts as 6-circuit or 12-circuit):
I found another interesting bit of information at Molex. They make female pins with dimples (only two on each of the two sides, four in total!) as well as female pins with springs on each of the four sides. The latter is marketed as RMF or Reduced Mating Force. Available with lubricant too but let's leave that for another day. So I must assume that one type of pin is not necessarily inferior or less reliable than the other, but there's any number of details that Astron could have screwed up, such as manufacturing tolerances, the choice of materials, thickness of metal and so on.