Worried About the GeForce RTX 4090's New 12VHPWR Power Socket? Don't Be

pcmag.com:

The launch of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 family of graphics cards has ushered in a new generation of graphics technology. (Check out our review at the link for evidence of that.) Not only is this mega-card a big step for Nvidia, but the GeForce RTX 4090 is also the first to employ the new 12VHPWR connector for powering graphics cards. With 12VHPWR likely to become a universal standard in the next few years for powering GPUs, this a momentous occasion.

This new interface between your GPU and your PC's power supply has a number of benefits over the old PCI Express six-pin and eight-pin power connectors that the industry has been using for more than a decade now. A good deal of misinformation, however, has been spreading around about this new power connection, and that needs to be addressed. If you have any concerns about the 12VHPWR connector, or simply want to know what it is capable of, keep reading.

Before we dive into the new 12VHPWR power connections, let’s first go over the old PCI Express six-pin and eight-pin connectors we have been using for over a decade now, and what they are capable of. It’s widely believed that the PCI Express six-pin power connectors have a maximum power limit of 75 watts, and the eight-pin ones have a maximum power limit of 150 watts, but this actually is not true.

When the PCI Express interface was first conceived a little more than 20 years ago, PCI Express x16 slots were designed to handle 75 watts of power passing from the motherboard to graphics cards. At the time, this was more than sufficient for graphics cards, but when this limit was eventually reached, it became necessary to add more power through another connection. At first, traditional four-pin Molex power connectors were used