PCIe Gen5 power connector is now compatible with the NVIDIA RTX 30 Founders Edition. Reports were released in the last months about next-gen GPUs fitted with next-gen power connectors. On the other hand, power supply manufacturers are starting to present new products equipped with such connectors.
ASUS confirmed the Thor PSU series a couple of months back, named as Gen5 ready. ASUS ROG Thor 1000W Platinum II PSU will be equipped with a 12-pin cable that can provide up to 600W of power, which was in fact the first power supply to possess this connector.
Andreas Schilling from HardwareLuxx reports that this connector is certainly compatible with the NVIDIA RTX 30 Founders Edition 12-pin cable, named “Molex MicroFit 3.0 dual row (12 circuits)”. The cable looks similar and has the same power supplying capacity. This shows that the company prepared the next-gen connector almost one year before the standard has even been shown.
Loki is another presentation by ASUS which is the latest generation of power supplies. Loki PSUs would be the first to feature a full implementation of the PCIe Gen5 connector, which is 12+4-pin.
From the above information, we gather that Geforce RTX 30 Founders Edition will fit with PCIe Gen5 connectors, simply because the manufacturers do not need more than 450W. S3 (SENSE0) signal assigned this limit. This is because if this requirement is not met then the PSU won’t supply 600W but up to 450W.
Moreover, the S1 (CARD_PWR_STABLE) and S2 (CARD_CBL_PRES) signals are to make sure that the graphics card is correctly connected. The fourth signal (S4) is not specified by the latest PCI-SIG specs.
The Gen5 connector is rated up to 9A at 12V, which means a maximum current of 648W. The official features show a maximum of 600W. This means that next-gen GPUs may end up with one connector instead of a triple 12-pin setup. Hopefully, the AMD RDNA3/NVIDIA Lovelace generation of GPUs will not require anything more powerful.
According to reports, NVIDIA’s latest coming flagship GPU namely the RTX 3090 Ti will be the first card to use this new PCIe Gen5 connector. A teaser from EVGA has been posted which shows a new Kingpin model that certainly doesn’t have a typical 8-pin connector setup.
Via Hardware Luxx, VideoCardz