Fear not, RTX 50-series owners, because ASRock’s new PSUs have extra thermal sensors to shut off overheating GPU power cables
I’m just as susceptible to a flashy OLED screen or over-designed chassis as the next person, but I’ll be damned, I think the two favourite things I’ve seen from Computex this year have been on power supplies, of all things. Yesterday there was the PSU with a swiveling power connector, and today we’re seeing that ASRock is making power supplies that fit 12V-2×6 power connectors with extra sensors to check for overheating.
That’s presumably as a response to the apparent issues some RTX 50-series graphics cards have with overheating power cables. The whole ‘melting RTX cable’ started last generation with the RTX 4090, but there have been some problems this generation, too.
We first heard about some RTX 5090 power connectors melting not long after launch. And just last month there was a report of a melted power cable on an RTX 5070, too—not even a high-power RTX 5080 or RTX 5090.
Tech YouTuber Der8auer investigated with a thermal camera and discovered that there was a lot of variance in how much current is flowing through each of the 12 wires on the 12VHPWR cable, and that two of the 12 wires were much hotter than the others. This was identified as a possible cause of the reported melting.
We don’t know to what extent each of the reports of RTX 50-series melted cables is down to user error, of course, such as might be caused by not having the power cable inserted fully.
That’s something yellow connector pins are supposed to help with, and of course it’s one reason behind the switch from the 12VHPWR cable’s original, shorter connector pins to the new, longer 12V-2×6 pins.
But if there are measurable drastic differences between the power flowing through different wires of the cable, it’s hard to imagine that it’s entirely the end user’s fault.
In theory, RTX 50-series cards could have per-pin power sensing to stop such variation, but not all do and apparently even Nvidia’s own Founders Edition RTX 5090 design doesn’t have it.
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Which means some additional protection should be useful, and ASRock seems to have that in mind here with its PSU and cable/connector design. It looks like the new power supplies (in the company’s Taichi or Phantom Gaming line-ups) have two standard 12V-2×6 connections but with additional two-pin sensors off to the side, with the 12VHPWR cables having a corresponding two-pin sensor to plug in.
This should check for cable temperature and shut it off if it gets too hot—a nice extra bit of security. Plus you get those yellow pins so you can more easily check the pins are fully inserted. We don’t know how well it works yet ourselves, of course, but it’s a great, practical idea.
Now, with the smart and sensible out of the way, let’s get back to those flashy OLEDs. Might as well stick one in all these PSUs, too.
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