News Sapphire Nitro+ RX 9070 XT hides its 16-pin connector inside, offers cableless look

[sfjuocekr]

A pair of fuses for six wire pairs?

Have these engineers really grown incapable of understanding what a parallel resistor circuit is that these wires form?

They need to be individually regulated, not as ONE!

 

[lmcnabney]

A pair of fuses for six wire pairs?

Have these engineers really grown incapable of understanding what a parallel resistor circuit is that these wires form?

They need to be individually regulated, not as ONE!

I don't know, but I expect that the six +12V wires are divided into two groups to be fed by three voltage wires each. A resistor is on each group of three and the current will be capped at 150W (12.5A). So even if a single wire is passing all 12.5A it won't melt the cable. It also kinda mimics the two 8-pin inputs that are used in the basic electrical harness. An OC card sucking back 350W could get by with just two 150W feeds on 8-pins and the 75W from the board.

 

[10basetom]

When I first saw the photo I thought it was a mini PC. My gosh, GPUs are getting so big 😲

 

[xBadJoKERx]

The fuses won't help at all. The connector melts due to poor connection / increased resistance, not due to excessive power. I wish some YouTuber like GamersNexus would try this card and make the connector melt and check if fuses helped. I'm sure they won't.

 

[renz496]

I'm a big Sapphire fan, but this is a HARD no for me. AMD is specifically trying to avoid the 16-pin issues, but Sapphire has now made the Radeon brand vulnerable, even if they are the only AIB that does this.

BTW, this must be on the 340W TBP models that AMD was talking about in their presentation.

Sapphire is not the only one. Asrock also using 16 pin. And they even have their 7900 use it before

 

[renz496]

AIB: still with the melting story? move on already. Even we AMD AIB are tired of this and want to use it on our card despite AMD themselves using it as a marketing tool as why not to buy nvidia gpu. Now excuse us. We also have new power supply to sell.

 

[SethNW]

Hopefully they sorted out current balancing and sensing, so card can balance it right, like Ampere did on its high end 16 pin models. Where it was noninssue. Plus potentially fuses, that are easy enough to replace. 16+4 pin issues are mainly because bVidia went super cheap on their design and you can cut 5 out of 6 power wires and card can't see the difference and will pull same current on one wire. I think 3090 has like 3x2 on sensing and that seemed to be enough.

 

[drahcir_rahl]

This is a huge NO WAY for me, not even if this GPU was free. What a stupidly compromised design.

• Many motherboards will have very different designs where this cable comes out.
• This is a flow through cooling design, which works very well usually but when you have to;
  • Block it with cables to accommodate antiquated power connections.
  • Further restrict it by covering the heat-sink with a material to prevent the wires from being abraded over time.

As someone who has worked on and even done some engineering/hacking on everything from PC's from the early 80's forward, automotive electronics, vcr's, other electronics items etc, I have never seen a group of people so utterly in denial about their designs.

Dump the 8 pin power connection. Make it 2 pins, make it capable of handling whatever wattage is reasonable. Stop building compromised designs that are just the best "it works for us in testing" you can come up with.

hardwareluxx.de posted a photo of the covering I mention, appears felt like, covers the fins, and has some holes in it but its reducing the airflow significantly.