GTX 970 6-Pin Power

[ctkeat]

I just built my new rig:

Anyways, I was just looking around inside my case, and I happen to notice that I had only plugged in 6 of the 8 pins of the GPU power (My GPU, ASUS 970 STRIX requires 1 8pin) . Before I plugged in all of them, I had been doing some serious gaming, and I was wondering if that could have damaged my GPU? (the GPU worked fine with 6 pins though.)

Should I worry about if I possibly damaged my GPU?



Thanks in advance!
PS:
This is also my first time on these forums.



Here's my build:
AMD FX-6300 3.5GHz 6-Core Processor
ASRock 970M PRO3 Micro ATX AM3+/AM3 Motherboard
Crucial Ballistix Sport 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory
Sandisk SSD PLUS 120GB 2.5" Solid State Drive
Hitachi Travelstar 5K1000 1TB 2.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive
Asus GeForce GTX 970 4GB STRIX Video Card
Cooler Master N200 MicroATX Mid Tower Case
Corsair CX 600W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply.

 

[nikoli707]

no damage. the card would have just lost the driver or returned a blue screen when passing its tdp. goes to show the card never used more than 150w, it gets 75w from the pcie lane and 75w from the 6pin. the 8 pin will supply up to 150w for a 300w theoretical total, though that would be an extreme overclock under water.

otherwise your fine no harm done. im surprised it let you boot to windows though. usually you will get a boot error telling you to properly connect the pcie power pins.

 

[pete_101]

The extra 2 pins are both ground wires, so therefore don't supply power to your card but rather help reduce the electrical resistance on the other 3 ground wires. So no harm would've been done.

 

[ctkeat]

no damage. the card would have just lost the driver or returned a blue screen when passing its tdp. goes to show the card never used more than 150w, it gets 75w from the pcie lane and 75w from the 6pin. the 8 pin will supply up to 150w for a 300w theoretical total, though that would be an extreme overclock under water.

otherwise your fine no harm done. im surprised it let you boot to windows though. usually you will get a boot error telling you to properly connect the pcie power pins.

Thanks!
It let me play on it and never gave me errors...
Guess nothings wrong then!