Let's begin with a story. Once upon a time, NVIDIA sunk a ton of time, money, and industry goodwill into adopting
not one, but three new variants of GPU power connectors over their last three generations
of GPUs. Why so many changes?
Well, as we saw with the RTX 4090, when you adopt a brand new standard like 12V high
power and slam 37 amps through it, sometimes things get a little... melty.
That's why the RTX 5090 was upgraded to a new and improved 12V 2x6 connector that...
What the heck, NVIDIA? People are paying thousands of dollars for these cards and they're still melting?
Why is this happening? Actually, you know what, no, it doesn't matter right now.
What matters is that Linus Electrical Engineering Tips is here to fix it for you.
All I need is a couple of these RC car battery connectors, a sacrificial RTX 5090, and a message
from our sponsor. To give ourselves our best shot at success, I've brought in some help from our fabrication
team and from the lab. Let's talk through the plan.
SuperWisk says why not just have a connector with two giant spades if it's going to be
that way on the inside? J5 says the XT60 connector can do 30 amps at 500 volts.
Yeah, why don't we just use that? That was a joke!
Well, you should've said slash s. Great! In a nutshell then, we're going to be removing NVIDIA's 12V 2x6 power connector and we're
going to be replacing it with a commodity XT series power connector, specifically the XT120.
On the WAN Show, I had actually proposed using a smaller XT60 or XT90, but as I learned
from talking to Lucas, those amp rating numbers are actually instantaneous rather than continuous.
As we've seen, the 5090 can very much draw its 50 amps in a continuous manner.
Which is why we need to make sure that whatever we're doing actually makes the situation better
rather than being another inadequate fix.
And as I learned already, I can't just trust this number on the side of the connector,
so is this good enough? Yep, 60 amp continuous or 120 instantaneous.
Okay, so total of 720 watts.
But that's not even the part that's most important to me though.
What I like about this is it has a really robust feeling, mating feel.
Like once that thing's in there, it's not going to get bumped by your side panel and
just wreck the whole thing, you know, like that's on there.
Certainly more confidence inspiring than this. Even sounds cheaper.
Now the question is, how are we going to attach this to this?
Anyone torn one of these down yet? No, but we did chuck it in the CT scanner though.
Excellent. That is not only a good way for us to do a feasibility analysis, but also a way for us
to see the underlying design issue that seems to be causing the stock connector to overheat.
If you look right here, while there are 12 pins, okay, 6 for 12 volt and 6 for ground,
they don't actually connect to the board separately.
They all go into this one strip of metal and connect to the board at a single point.
That means that the card has no way of knowing if one or more of the pins has a poor connection,
which will force the others to pick up the slack. To demonstrate why this is such a problem, their power even went as far as to cut some
of the wires on his power supply, which obviously caused the remaining ones to heat up.
Let's take it apart, shall we? This is the easy part.
They trust me to do this part.
Oh, look at that. So many more screws. And of course, it's a different head size, because if I wouldn't it be.
Oh, that comes off next. Oh, look at that.
Look at her go.
Wow. We might not even need to go that deep.
Feasibly. See, right there.
There it is. The little blades. Feasibly, we could attach our friggin wire to that right now.
It's just that the clearances might be a little tough.
Before we go too far though, I need to make one thing clear.
NVIDIA didn't design these problematic connectors.
12 volt high power, which was found on the 4090, was adopted as part of the ATX 3.0
spec back in early 2022. And the replacement 12 volt 2 by 6 connector, the one that shows up on the 5090, is part
of ATX 3.1. It looks just like the old one, but it actually tweaks the length of the prongs in an attempt
to prevent power from flowing through an improperly inserted cable, a mitigation that clearly
isn't working. So if NVIDIA didn't invent these connectors, then why are they taking so much heat over
them? Well, it's because they're the only GPU brand that's going all in on them.
Not only were they so excited about these new connectors that they raced ahead of the
rest of the class using a proprietary version on the 30 series before the spec was even
published, but they have also forced their board partners to go along with their shenanigans
instead of allowing them to use old school 8 pin PCIe power connectors if they like.
But Linus, you might say, I've got a 4090 and it's been totally fine.
And you're right, lots of people do. The 12 volt high power connectors are fine, in ideal conditions.
But what if you're using a poorly made extension or adapter, or jamming your card into a narrow
case which puts pressure on the power connector?
Well, now your ideal conditions have gone out the window.
And as you can see in our CT scans, the card has no way of knowing if some of your wires
booked a one way ticket to Nelts town. How are you guys doing?
That's so far so good. Oh.
All right, buddy.
We just soldered straight to these and then we're G to G. I mean, yeah, we could.
That size of wire on there looks like it could be a bit of a challenge.
Yeah, it's not great if you want the paths to stay on spot.
My question for you then is, why do we need such a big one?
This seems like massive overkill for a GPU, especially when you look at the wimpy little
size of the 16 gauge wires that are running it already.
Well, you have to make up for not having six of them. They have about a similar surface area when you really get down to it.
Similar? Is this actually enough? It's maybe a little bit on the light side.
We could go with a six gauge, but, you know, those are the connectors.
Our wire might actually get a little bit on the warmer side, but at least our connector
will make properly. Here's my other question.
If NVIDIA feels that a single 12 volt and a single ground connection to the board is
fine, why did they reinvent the wheel instead of just using one of the numerous high amperage
power connectors that already exist that could have just gone to two fickle wires?
We'll get to that later. First, let's rip that connector off.
Wow, I mean, they're definitely stronger together.
Ape wire strong together. Woo!
See you later, buddy. That looks a lot thicker. Oh, maybe not.
And they're copper. Oh, hey, there it goes. Oh, wow, there's all that liquid metal.
Yep, there it is. Wow, that's a lot of liquid metal.
That is? Well, they didn't cheap out on that.
The board is so tiny. Yeah, I know. All right, let's rip our connector off.
Super cool. I can't believe we're doing this.
What do you think motivated them to just combine everything into these two bus, I mean, I
would almost call it like a bus bar? What would you call these? I'd get a rail or bus bar, yeah, bus.
Sure. Why would they combine it into just two instead of grouping three pins and then the next three
or something like that? They did do groups of three and smaller groups on previous ones, but I think they just needed
the whole, all the surface area they could get because even on the bottom, you can see there's not much, it doesn't take much surface area of the board and like the bottom of the
rail. Yeah, I guess that's true. That is a really, really small contact point for a freaking like 50 amps, isn't it?
If they were trying to split that into two and then run both of those at 25, then they'd
be smaller. Do you think this came down to them trying to make this board super small for the pass
through cooler? I imagine so, yeah.
Now it's time to start hacking off the connector. I'm going to do it also carefully with a pair of snips here.
You know we're going to hell for this, right? Oh, absolutely. Okay.
Wait, what happened? How'd you knock off this puggle pin?
I'll be honest with you. I don't know. I just noticed it wasn't there.
Oh, balls. Where does it come from? Right there.
Oh. Luckily for you, I feel pretty confident about putting it back.
Hey, I soldered one of the CPU pins on the broken CPUs.
I got it back on. Okay. I'm still glad this isn't like a for realsies thing because I would have been fired.
Didn't fix the CPU on you. I turned back on, so I'd say I did.
Yeah, I think she's going here, here, here, maybe pliers.
You're using a cutting tool to pull, pull, she's clean, bud.
Yeah. I think that should give us place room, but she'd be plenty of room to solder to.
Okay. Do we, we know which one's ground, right?
Yes. It's the one furthest away from the sense pin.
Beautiful. So this bad boy, damn it, I stabbed myself.
Okay. So without stabbing ourselves, I propose fins out like that and then goes on there.
How the hell are we going to do that? I think that's basically impossible.
Okay. New plan. That was my plan.
We bend it. That was my plan. Oh.
Use a pair of pliers towards the base gently.
She'll be fine. So now we got some room in there. It's not much, is it?
Oh, it depends which way you look at it. I'm going to solder to that side probably and then that side, that way they have no
chance of meeting in the middle. So we've taken the Henry Ford approach to wire colors.
You can have any you want as long as it's the one. Exactly.
We're using red wires for both.
Oh, good. How could we possibly get it mixed up?
Okay. Is that the one that you're planning to solder to the board or is that the other one?
Yes, this is the one going to the board. Okay. I said six inches long though.
It's a little, I'm feeling a little inadequate looking at it.
I bet you if you grab a ruler right now that is six inches. I don't, I don't use rulers.
I use emotions to measure certain things. Ah, yes.
We're not going to get the polarity mixed up with our two red wires, right?
Nope. One says positive, one says negative. Brilliant.
As long as he sticks to that, I'm positive that nothing negative will happen.
Yeah, you got the right idea. I can't believe we're doing this to this thing.
Just so you guys know, our plan is not to like never use this again or whatever.
This will still be in service. Just whenever we use it, we're going to have to use a bit of a special power supply.
Hey, we should maybe start working on that power cable.
Wait, what is this? I told you guys, I don't want to do that with the thing.
Guys, come on.
I mean, it's nicer than soldering it.
It's so janky.
This is so much worse than just soldering it all to the white.
Anything I'll recommend crimps over just soldering to another connector?
The crimps are not the problem. The giant connectors here are the problem.
This is what they want to do. They want to just put a bolt through all of this.
So why is crimping it better than soldering it? I've always wondered that too, because...
Far more structurally sound and not as brittle as solder.
Basically, we have to plug into our modular power supply somehow. So we took the modular cable that of course has a 12 volt 2 by 6 on it.
And then on the other end, we're going to adapt that to just two big chunks of 12 volt and ground.
But these sense pins are needed for the power supply and the GPU to communicate their capabilities to each other.
So we were hoping to just use the original block of sense pins and just plug them on.
But I have to reattach them now because I cut them off earlier.
Okay, I've got the sense pins reassembled. Is there anything that would prevent us from putting the card back together?
In theory, no, but just for as a last sanity check here, let's just do a continuity check and make sure that those two ain't shortened
before we send a whole bunch of power through it. All right.
All right, beep equals bad.
Only a singular beep, not two beeps. No beeps, we're good.
Okay, good luck everybody. Doesn't look janky at all.
Yeah. Are we even going to have enough clearance for all of this crap?
Oh boy. Yep, not enough clearance.
Why not? Well, because we might have bent things a lot.
A little. We added like six inches of wire to the back of the card.
Well, look, I'd like to see you do better.
Nah, it wouldn't happen. I think with the way I've bent it a little bit, lightly bent it, I think she goes.
Oh, she's a goer. Dude, she's a goer.
Beautiful. Oh my God, not beautiful, but something.
Oh my God. Okay. Well, that's a thing that exists now.
This might be the worst thing we've ever done.
Come on. I feel like for how often I say that, I'm going to need like a shirt.
Glenn, are you getting this? Which one?
This. Okay. What the?
What? I didn't do this. I'm making it safe.
I blame Lucas 100%.
He insisted that we not solder the eight wires to the one wire.
That would have looked way worse. What?
No way. I thought you people are supposed to be the adults in the room.
What, you people? No, obviously, I don't mean it like that.
I mean, you people, the people who work here and are supposed to supervise me.
Just don't touch the new work. It'll be fine.
Anyone else getting like a BDSM vibe from this?
Crap it on there.
Sorry. This is so stupid.
Okay. What am I checking? Sorry.
Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. I got you. Okay.
This is the worst thing we've ever done. Not yet. I mean, it hasn't died yet.
Oh my God. As far as we're aware.
Oh my God. Good call.
Now we take our sense pins and...
Oh boy, can I get in there? Oh yeah, I can get in there.
Okay. Sense pins are connected. Now we just need to do our power connector and...
Oh! Wow. That's a connection and a half.
At least a connection and a third. I mean, she's locked on there pretty good, right?
Oh man, I'm not going to lie. I'm a little stressed right now.
Do you guys imagine for a second that after what we did to this,
NVIDIA is going to replace this for us? You know, we need one.
It's not like we could buy one easily.
The fans are spinning. The lights are on. The lights are on.
These are very good signs. Yes!
Oh, dude. It's fine. Okay.
But we're not really drawing any power yet. So I guess we never explained the sense pins.
These tell the G... Oh wait, did I explain that? I think I did.
Well, whatever. The plan was to ground sense zero and one,
which will tell everything 600 watts is fine, but we didn't do that because our sense pins ended up working.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, test. Let's do it.
Benchmark 2160.
What could go wrong?
Oh, that was a little scary.
Oh? I mean, wasn't it when the screen went blank?
I wasn't watching that screen. I thought it was a little scary. Okay.
She's squealing a little, but from my understanding, that's kind of normal for these Founders editions.
Why is it like 40 to 50?
I mean, that's well within safe, right?
Yeah. Hold on. What are these wires rated for?
Come on, people. It should be over 80 or 90.
85. There you go. Huh.
GPU temp, 73. GPU clock, 2.33 gigahertz.
That's what we would expect.
Fans are working. GPU power, 575 watts.
It has the rest of the cable temp here.
30 there. The line is heading the way there.
Well, I'm checking. I'm checking. It's 30.
It looks like a great connection to me.
There you go. So it's going to your personal rig now?
I mean, I don't see how anyone else could use it.
No, I think the lab wants it back, actually, which is kind of hilarious.
I don't if they want this one back. You sure? Why not?
It's perfectly fine. Perfectly good. If anything, I would say it's safer than before.
That's true. I wouldn't say it with a lot of confidence, but I would say it.
So it works. And sure, it's not standard, but NVIDIA has clearly demonstrated
that when they throw their weight behind something, it quickly becomes a standard.
So after being stung once by these little piddly little connectors,
why didn't they just do this? Well, there are a few reasons we can think of,
but the most important one probably is cost.
It's always cost, isn't it? Looking at some common bulk sources,
the difference in price between the two connectors is realistically going to be pennies.
So what it seems to come down to is the wire.
Now, technically NVIDIA doesn't need any wire to build their cards,
but anytime you create an industry standard,
you have to consider everyone's perspective. And when we looked at the difference in cost
between 12 16 gauge conductors, like we have now,
versus two big fat eight gauge conductors of the same length,
it was a bigger difference than we thought. And when you multiply that across all the thousands,
millions of systems that are being built worldwide,
you start to understand why they want to go with
whatever the cheapest connector is. Not to mention that thinner conductors are also more flexible
for cable management and easier to work with
in manufacturing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So I understand why they did it, but that doesn't mean that what we're dealing with now is okay.
So what do we do? Are all 50 90s just as dangerous?
Well, as it turns out, the answer is no.
We reached out to both MSI and ASUS, NVIDIA board partners.
ASUS then went as far as to assure us that their implementation
allows per pin monitoring and even went as far
as to create an in-game overlay to show that everything is working fine.
As for what to do if you already bought a founder's edition,
that I don't know, but I suspect that NVIDIA is going to have
to do something about this, given the potential for a user safety problem.
Maybe they recommend people do this? Probably not, but you know what they might recommend
is this segue to our sponsor. If you guys enjoyed this video, why not check out
the one where we gamed at 8K on the 50 90.
I mean, all of its flaws is a very capable gaming card.
Just gotta hook it up right.