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High Power PCIe Gen5 power connector for next-gen GPUs pictured, up to 600W
Earlier this week [we published] an article about the upcoming flagship GeForce RTX 3090 Ti graphics card, which is now set to launch in January. The graphics card is supposedly the first card to feature a PCIe Gen5 power connector, a new standard that will ultimately solve one of the biggest drawbacks of the current 8-pin power connector, an insufficient power it can provide (up to 150W).
Igor Wallossek from Igor'sLAB managed to obtain the schematics and the information on the new connector, confirming that there is indeed a new standard coming, possibly to all new graphics cards in 2022.
Just as we said, the power connector has 16 lanes in total (12 power and 4 signal lanes), but it's not a MicroFit Molex standard, but something entirely new. The standard [as defined] has smaller spacing than existing connectors, a change from 4.2 mm to 3.0 mm. The connector has a width of 18.85 mm, so it is not exactly small, but much smaller than dual or triple 8-pin connector configuration. This will greatly simplify the circuit and PCB design process, not to mention all the space that will be saved.
The PCI-SIG specs define that each pin can sustain up to 9.2A, which means a total of 55.2 A at 12V. This gives a maximum power of 662W, but the specs officially go up to 600W, Igor notes. Along with twelve pins for power, there are [an] additional 4 signal lanes right underneath the connector. At this moment it is unclear what [their purpose is] or whether they are required or optional.
Also at Wccftech.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday October 14 2021, @01:30PM
I don't think that's needed at all. You aren't going to see a 600 Watt consumer GPU next-gen, perhaps ever. Stick a CPU using 250 Watts with a GPU using 450 Watts, and that's a mere 700 Watts from the most power-hungry components. 2 kW not needed. Maybe 1200 W? Here's a 1300 W. [amazon.com]
At some point there will be a reckoning with GPUs. How much rasterization and ray-tracing performance is needed? Flagship performance could be absurdly high [wccftech.com] even before the adoption of gate-all-around transistors and a couple further node shrinks. If multi-monitor 8K 1000 FPS is the target, then we still have a long way to go, but even APUs will have acceptable 4K performance soon (this a tricky thing because the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 already use "giant" APUs that target 4K 60 FPS in some games, while "the world's best desktop APU", the Ryzen 7 5700G, has comparatively anemic graphics performance).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]