HardwareBusters recently paid a visit to Linewell, the company that manufactures power cables for well-known brands like ASUS. Given the industry’s shift towards the new power connector design, Aris and his team opted to directly visit the location where these cable tests are being conducted.
During an extended-duration test lasting over 50 minutes, Linewell assessed a new 12V-2×6 cable. The connector’s temperature remained below 46.5°C throughout the test. Subsequently, the cable was intentionally not fully inserted and subjected to the same power settings. Remarkably, it received a substantial 55 Amps of power and consistently delivered over 640W. Thermal imaging confirmed that the cable’s temperature only reached a modest 41°C, well below the melting point.
It’s crucial to emphasize that the design of this new cable should inherently prevent such scenarios from arising initially. The sense pins, responsible for negotiating higher power usage, ideally should limit the delivery of 600+W of power when they are not securely connected. However, the goal of this test was to illustrate that the new power pins are not only more conductive but also less prone to generating excessive heat. In other words, during this test, the sense pins were intentionally shorted, a situation that wouldn’t always occur with a partially seated cable.
Additionally, it’s worth highlighting that even when subjected to extreme bending in various directions, the cable’s temperature remained stable. Nonetheless, there is uncertainty about whether power supply companies will reconsider their guidelines concerning bending distances.
The revised 12V-2×6 cable signifies a significant leap forward in graphics card power distribution. It is now the default for all newly shipped RTX 40 cards, and power supplies are also adjusting to this updated standard. It should be kept in mind that every power cable and connector carries some level of failure risk, and no design is entirely immune to flaws.
