With the RTX 5090 now priced at over $5,000 just about everywhere, owners are understandably nervous about their card catching fire thanks to that problematic 12V-2×6 cable. Modders have found a way to ease that anxiety: remove the problematic cable entirely and switch back to the classic 8-pin PCIe connectors, as TechPowerUp reports.
Perhaps that’s just how the card should have been made in the first place.
Nvidia switched to a new power connector with its RTX 40 and 50 series cards because they pull a lot more power. With each 8-pin cable rated to carry 150W—and up to around 220W unofficially—Nvidia’s new cards with 500W+ power demands needed something else. Hence the 12VHPWR and eventually, the 12V-2×6 version. But it turns out it needn’t have bothered.
Modders at TecLab have soldered a trio of 8-pin power connectors to an RTX 5090, dropping the need for the 12V-2×6 entirely, per a report from TechPowerUp. It took three of them, and the wires for this mod are not pretty by any means. But it works, and it’s less likely to set your PSU on fire. Probably. I’m sure those soldered connections are decent.
That’s not the only mod going on here, though. The card also has two giant fans and a custom waterblock for the core, with heaps of big VRM heatsinks.
All of that aimed to achieve high clock speeds and impressive benchmark scores. The modders were able to overclock the card so it ended up pulling up to 900W across the three cables and PCIe socket, hitting a maximum sustained boost clock of 3,400MHz in the process. This was entirely hardware modded too, with no software or BIOS mods. An impressive feat.
It won’t make 8-pin mainstream for top-tier cards again, but it shows it’s doable if Nvidia wanted to put in the engineering work. Instead, though, it opted for a new proprietary design, which has been anything but beloved.
What’s the bet that the 60-series will just have two 12V-2×6 connectors?
