With the discharge of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090, we entered a brand new period of cable administration, particularly due to points across the 12VHPWR cable to the cardboard doubtlessly creating a fireplace hazard if improperly seated. 

This has made cable administration much more essential for the most effective graphics card available on the market, and Gigabyte’s new Windforce RTX 4090 V2 takes an revolutionary strategy to coping with the difficulty: slap the facility connector on the again of the cardboard moderately than the highest.

The brand new card, which hasn’t gone on sale but, has its 16-pin energy connector seated behind the fan shroud of the graphics card. This implies plugging it into your PSU, both utilizing the 4-to-1 cable adapter for older energy provides or utilizing one of many new 12VHPWR cables suitable with the brand new ATX 3.zero energy provides, needs to be an entire lot simpler.

The location of this energy connector will considerably cut back the quantity of cable bending required to plug within the card. As VideoCardz notes, the normal design of a graphics card has the facility cable located on prime of the PCB, which faces out from the case when slotted into an upright case, forcing you to should bend the facility cable to insert the connector into the cardboard.

This place means that there’s a respectable quantity of torque stress on the connector itself, particularly in case you’ve received 4 8-pin cables plugged into an adapter. This bending stress on the facility connector of the graphics card can result in the inconsistent contact of the facility leads within the cable to the connector on the cardboard, which is what Nvidia decided was a part of the reason for its cable melting points when the RTX 4090 first launched again in 2022.

The brand new Gigabyte Windforce card, in the meantime, ought to forestall or at the very least mitigate that sort of security hazard. Along with decreasing the possibly unsafe cable bending stress on its card, the brand new design additionally simply makes it simpler to attach the facility to the cardboard. Given the standard design of lots of the finest PC circumstances, we’re all for it.

Energy necessities for graphics playing cards forcing a rethink on design

Gigabyte is not the one firm that’s trying on the new Nvidia graphics playing cards and reevaluating the way it approaches energy supply. At Computex 2023, I noticed a design for the Asus GeForce RTX 4070 BTF together with a B760M-BTF WiFi D4 motherboard that accommodated a further “gold finger” energy connection immediately into the motherboard to provide energy to the cardboard, moderately than utilizing an 8-pin or 16-pin cable from the facility provide.

Whereas the RTX 4070 does not demand that a lot energy comparatively talking, designing the cardboard and motherboard this fashion lets you utterly remove the necessity for a further energy cable for the graphics card. That is implausible in case you’re searching for a cleaner-looking case, however it additionally signifies that there’s much less threat that dangerous cable administration would possibly harm the cardboard.

Whereas I am unable to see a world the place the RTX 4090 will get all the facility it wants from a motherboard connection, plenty of different playing cards would possibly, and even with the RTX 4090, having some further energy drawn from the motherboard would possibly cut back the necessity for a 12VHPWR cable in any respect, since an 8-pin could possibly be enough for the extra energy {that a} motherboard connection could not present.