[BigJono]

This shit is so fucking dumb. Sorry for the unhinged rant, but it's ridiculous how bad every single connector involved with building a PC is in 2025.

I'm just a software guy, so maybe some hardware engineer can chime in (and I'd love to find out exactly what I'm missing and why it might be harder than it seems), but why on earth can everything not just be easily accessible and click nicely into place?

I'm paying multiple hundred dollars for most of these parts, and multiple thousands for some now that GPUs just get more and more expensive by the year, and the connector quality just gets worse and worse. How much more per unit can proper connectors possibly cost?

I still have to sit there stressing out because I have no idea if the PSU<->Mobo power connector is seated properly, I have no idea if the GPU 12VHPWR cable is seated properly, I'm tearing skin off my fingers trying to get the PSU side of the power cables in because they're all seated so closely together, have a microscopic amount of plastic to grip onto making it impossible to get any leverage, and need so much force to seat properly, again with no fucking click. I have no idea if any of the front panel pins are seated properly, I can't even reach half of them even in a full ATX case, fuck me if I want anything smaller, and no matter what order you assemble everything in, something is going to block off access to something else.

I'm sure if you work in a PC shop and deal with this 15 times a day you'll have strategies for dealing with it all, but most of us build a PC once every 3 years if that. It feels like as an average user you have zero chance to build any intuition about how any of it works, and it's infuriating that the hardware engineers seem to put in fuck all effort to help their customers assemble their expensive parts without breaking them, or in this case, having them catch fire because something is off by a millimetre.

This space feels ripe for a radical re-design.

[mlsu]

Connectors are actually extremely difficult to make.

- you have to ensure that the metal connectors take shape and bond to the wire properly. This is done by crimping. Look up how much a good crimping tool costs for a rough approximation of how difficult it can be to get this right.

- one plastic bit has to mate with another plastic bit, mechanically. This needs to be easy enough for 99.99% of users to do easily, yet it needs to be 99.99% reliable, so that the two bits will not become separated, even partially. Even under thermal expansion.

- the electrical contacts inside must be mechanically mated over a large surface area so that current can pass from one connector to another.

- it must be intuitive for people to use. Ideally user pushes it and it clicks right in. No weird angles either, it could be behind a mechanical component that's tough to reach. Also, user has to be able to un-mate the connector from the same position. It should be tough for a user to accidentally plug in an ill suited connector into the wrong slot.

- has to cost peanuts. Nobody will pay $3 for a connector. Nobody will even want to pay $1 for a connector. BOM cost is 15-20% finished goods cost. Will the end user pay $8, $10, $12 for a good connector? No.

- repeatable to manufacture (on the board and on the cable) at high quality. User might take apart their PC a dozen times, to fix things, clean, etc for the lifetime of the component. So the quality bar is actually very high. Nothing can come loose or break off, not even internal parts.

- physically compact. PCB space is at an extreme premium.

- your connector design has to live across many product cycles, since people are going to be connecting old parts to new boards and they'll be upset if they can't do this. So this increases risk by a lot as redesigning a connector means breaking compatibility for existing users.

Connectors are actually a very very deep and interesting well.

I'm not surprised at all that they are running into issues here, these cards are pulling 500+ watts. That is a LOT of current.

I think next gen we will begin seeing 24V power supplies to deal with this.

[pja]

> I think next gen we will begin seeing 24V power supplies to deal with this.

May as well go the whole hog & jump to 48V.

(50V is as high as you can go whilst still being inside the “low voltage” electrical safety regime in most countries IIRC.)

[eqvinox]

General SELV limit is 60V, that's why PoE is 54≈56V at the source (it's calculated at roughly 10% tolerance so it can be built cheaply.)

[Schiendelman]

Then the graphics card would have to have a transformer on it to step down to the voltage that the chips can handle.

[dcan]

They already do - most of the components buck the 12V down to the 1.3ish volts that the GPU core needs

[xxs]

They are not transformers, though. The coil/chokes are not galvanically isolated which makes them (more) efficient. Stepping down from 48V to 0.8V (with massive transient spikes) is generally way harder than doing it from 12V. So they may ended with multi step converters but that would mean more PC with more passives.

[eqvinox]

3.3V from 48V is a standard application for PoE. (12V intermediate is more common though.) The duty cycle does get a bit extreme. But yes, most step-down controllers can't cover both an 0.8V output voltage and 48-60V input voltage. (TI Webench gives me one - and only one - suggested circuit, using an LM5185. With an atrocious efficency estimate.)

You'd probably use an intermediate 12V rail especially since that means you just reuse the existing 0.8V regulator designs.

[Schiendelman]

So then it would need to be significantly larger.

[lazide]

Likely smaller actually.

[deelowe]

No one uses transformers anymore. VRRs are basically mini PCs now. They run firmware and report telemetry and are crazy efficient.

[Schiendelman]

I'm not familiar with this! I've tried to investigate but I just get variable refresh rate. Tell me more?

[deelowe]

Voltage regulators. Voltage regulation technology is extremely advanced as even very small efficiency gains can save billions for hyperscalers. Unfortunately, I don't know of any specific products to share as power isn't my domain. I'm only familiar with the space because we sometimes have to pull telemetry directly from the VRs when doing system level RCAs. Some of our BMCs can do this directly via I2C.

[readingnews]

>> Connectors are actually extremely difficult to make.

While your points listed are valid, we have been making connectors that overcome these points for decades, in some cases approaching the century mark.

>> I'm not surprised at all that they are running into issues here, these cards are pulling 500+ watts. That is a LOT of current.

Nonsense. I used to work at an industrial power generation company. 500W is _nothing_. At 12VDC, that is 41.66A of current. A few, small, well made pins and wires can handle that. It should not be a big deal to overcome that. We have overcome that in cars (which undergo _extreme_ temperature and environmental changes, in mere minutes and hours, daily, for years), space stations (geez), appliances, and thousands of other industrial applications that you do not see (robots, cranes, elevators, equipment in fields and farmlands, equipment in mines, equipment misused by people)... and those systems fail less frequently than Nvidia connectors. But your comment would lead one to think that building a connector with twelve pins on it to handle a whopping (I am joking) 500W (not much, really, I have had connectors in equipment that needed to handle 1,000,000Watts of power, OUTDOORS, IN THE RAIN, and be taken apart and put back together DAILY) is an insurmountable task.

[userbinator]

One word: cost.

Look up how much industrial/automotive connectors cost, and you'll see the huge difference in quality.

[drdaeman]

Those GPUs aren’t particularly cheap, even a $100 connector and cable wouldn’t be a huge deal breaker for a $2000-3000 device if it means it’s reliable and won’t start a fire (that’ll cost way more than $3100)

[vollbrecht]

Yes cheap connectors exist and there is a marked for it, like everything "cheap". But to what point one wants to "defend" a trillion dollar company, on a product that was never marketed as "cheap", that actually comes with a hefty price tag, to skimp on something that is 0.01% of there BoM cost. If you sell for a premium price you should better make sure your product is premium.

[Manozco]

I've bought cars that cost me less than a nVidia card (and they were running).

[FirmwareBurner]

Which new cars cost less than 2000$-1000$?

[ziddoap]

They didn't say new cars.

[janalsncm]

That would be relevant if the margins on GPUs weren’t astronomical.

[broeng]

No, not for a connector for 500W, on a $2000 GPU from one of the worlds biggest companies. They can do better.

[Henchman21]

Well surely they can take that cost out of the $5090 people are paying for these cards.

[state_less]

They could use a common XT90 or something similar. You find high amperage connectors on all the RC lipo batteries and they are cheap enough, you find them on $100 products (batteries).

I regularly work with 100amp+ at 12v. It’s obvious the connector NVidia is using is atrocious and we all know it.

[jnwatson]

Nvidia is clearing 4 figures on each 5090. They can afford another few dollars on connectors.

[ImHereToVote]

"Nobody will pay $3 for a connector"

I would pay $10.

[Henchman21]

This whole conversation seems absurd! Of course you'd pay for the right power connector for your multi-thousand dollar card!

You don't buy a $200k sports car and then take it to Jiffy Lube for oil changes. You pony up for the cost of proper maintenance!

[Modified3019]

A quote I found the other day and saved (forgot where from):

>Like the classic trope says, it's not about affording to buy the Ferrari, it's whether you can afford to maintain it.

[accrual]

I know we're just ranting, and there are reasons for the seemingly bad designs. But I have a very recent 1200W Corsair (ATX 3.1/PCIe 5.1) which uses these special "type 5" mini connectors on the PSU side. It's painful to try and get your fingers between them to unclip a cable, and yesterday two of the clips broke off just trying to remove them. I ended up taking the whole PSU out just to make sure I didn't lose plastic clips into the PSU itself. It's fine now, but two of my cables will never latch again. Just, blah.

My first build used a Kingwin PSU from around 2007 which used "aircraft style" round connectors which easily plugged in then screwed down. It even had a ring of blue LEDs around the connectors. It was so cool and felt premium! Having that experience to compare to made the Corsair feel cheap despite being so much more powerful.

[Workaccount2]

I work in power electronics and there are ample connectors that can handle any type of power requirement.

What is happening in the computer space is that everyone is clinging to an old style of doing things, likely because it is free and open, and suggestions to move to new connectors get saddled with proprietary licensing fees.

D-sub power connectors have been around forever (they even look like the '90s still) and would easily be able to power even future monster GPUs. They screw in for a strong connection too, but no reason you couldn't make ones that snap in too.[1]

[1]https://i.ebayimg.com/thumbs/images/g/A0MAAOSwYGFUvkFg/s-l50...

[unshavedyak]

Man would i prefer screw in. I hate snap. All of those things in motherboards that require serious force and if you don't know what you're doing it's quite easy to not realize the reason something isn't going in is because of a block/issue, rather than not enough force. So the user adds more force and bam, something breaks.

Then of course there's just so much force in general it's easy for a finger/hand to slip and bump/hurt something else, etcetc.

I tend not to enjoy PC building because of that. Screws on everything would be so nice imo. Doubly so if we could increase the damn motherboard size to support these insane GPU sizes lol.

[rasz]

You are proposing connector with exposed live 12V pins.

[RavSS]

Would it be any less safe than a Molex connector? They sometimes still come with brand new PSUs for compatibility. They have 12 volt pins too (yellow wire) if I remember correctly that can be very loose. Back when they were more standard, I'd seen sparks go off after they touched a case's chassis, as a cable to the PSU could have multiple unused/unplugged Molex connectors on it just hanging somewhere. The older PSUs I've used never came with full covers for them, so wrapping them in electrical tape was the "fix".

[xg15]

Not a hardware guy, but I wonder if that's a factor in connector choice. Basically, if a significant fraction of PC building is done by teens or young adults building their gaming rig in their living room, with neither formal training nor oversight, do designers have to make sure this is "teenage proof"?

[Workaccount2]

The GPU and PSU would have female ports and the cable would be male.

12V isn't dangerous to humans, but it could spark quite a bit if it hit the computer chassis.

[aaronmdjones]

On the contrary, a system like this would most certainly be designed such that the PSU outlet is female, the GPU inlet is male, and you'd use a male to female power cable. This way, a cable plugged only into a device leaves exposed but dead pins on the other end, and a cable plugged only into a PSU leaves non-exposed pins on the other end.

Just like UPSes have C13 outlets, ATX PSUs have C14 inlets, and you plug a desktop PC into a UPS with a C14 to C13 cable.

[delichon]

There exists a perfectly balanced point between usability and affordability that, if it can be achieved, makes exactly nobody happy.

[account42]

GP's point is that "affordability" here is penny pinching considering the cost of the components those cables connect (and are usually included with).

[stefan_]

My favorite is these shitty RGB connectors. They were obviously very recently decided on, yet somehow what we got is something without any positive retention or determined orientation yet still obnoxiously big.

[Dylan16807]

What's wrong with the 4/6/8 pin plugs? I find them perfectly good. And they have a high power variant that would have worked much better here, rated for twice the current per pin.

[BigJono]

They're the best of the bunch when it comes to PC parts, but think how far off they are in terms of usability compared to USB, or Ethernet, or HDMI, or Displayport, or those old VGA cables you had to screw in, or literally anything else. They only look good in comparison to the other power connectors.

[whywhywhywhy]

> They're the best of the bunch when it comes to PC parts

Not really, the PSU side isn't standardized at all and it's not obvious at all because the cables will happily fit when you plug cables from PSU A into PSU B and fry your entire build.

Theres no benefit to not having standards on that side, and the other side is all standard so they are able to follow standards there, "It's just the way it's always been" so they keep doing it

[cosmic_cheese]

Even the now ancient and defunct FireWire 400 connector is nicer than most internal PC connectors.

[hulitu]

> how far off they are in terms of usability compared to USB, or Ethernet, or HDMI, or Displayport, or those old VGA cables

Those connectors were not designed to carry power.

[account42]

USB, especially USB C, is very much designed to carry power. Not quite as much as high end graphics cards guzzle these days but it goes up to 240W. Ethernet, HDMI, DP and even VGA (with extensiosn) are also all used to carry power even if much smaller currents.

[Dylan16807]

It's designed for 5 amps. In this context, that's close enough to "not carrying power".

If we're considering the bigger voltages that allow higher power on USB C, then the existing GPU plugs are fine because we can deliver 600W using the same current as a 150W 8 pin plug.

[lenerdenator]

> This space feels ripe for a radical re-design.

Making electrical connectors that do their job safely and properly is a solved problem in the engineering world.

Doing so in a way that allows for maximum profit is not.

[numpad0]

They want to use the Molex for some reason. That's what doesn't make sense. They could just like, give it two ring connectors and let gamers screw them on. Bigger ones of rings take 50A(*12V = 600W) just fine.

[Schiendelman]

Define the exact "they" you're talking about and you'll start to see the problem.

[numpad0]

I'm suspecting it's really less than half a dozen people at NVIDIA, like guys in purchasing division or PCB designers not wanting to make a drastic parts/footprint change. M8 SMD lug terminal in a gamer accessory is crazy, but not rocket science.

[Schiendelman]

That's what I wondered, you may not understand all the players. I believe the PCI standard specifies this Molex connector. Somewhere between what Nvidia ships and the power supply itself, that standard is the only common connection.

[numpad0]

No, NVIDIA's use of the connector and first reports of melting predates the spec. They were never had hands tied to use it.

Gaming GPUs are having sagging problems for years too, and little is done to solve it. The cards are bending in their own weight. They're not products of proper engineering.

[Schiendelman]

Oh, tell me more - what year was this added to the spec, and what year did nvidia start offering this connector?

[structural]

Good connectors are expensive. All-plastic connectors like these are extremely cheap. Here's an example of a connector style as used in internal PC power cabling:

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/amphenol-icc-fci/...

This is $0.20/ea in bulk from a distributor, after import into the US, and after distributor markup. Probably $0.10-0.15 or even less at he scale board manufacturers are working at. You have 4 of these kind of connectors in your system (1 on the GPU, one on the power supply, and two on the cable). So still <$1 total in volume.

A quality d-sub power connector that has a metal housing and screws in place is going to be about $10/each. That's $40 just in connector parts, just to power your GPU, not including every other power cable in the unit, and not including all the herding cats you need to do to get the entire PC industry to shift over to using your new connector.

So, yes, you could do this, but you'd probably double the cost of a PC power supply (if all connectors used were upgraded to the same standard) and increase the cost of every GPU by $100-200, minimum.

People are already complaining that modern GPUs cost too much, so businesses making parts have assessed that it hasn't been worth it to spend this kind of money on connectors. Now, this may change at 600+W... clearly something has to change soon, as we're seeing the limits of what the existing standards can do.

[Wingman4l7]

If you increased the cost of the GPU by the upper end of your estimate ($200), that's a 10% increase of the new top end GPU (MSRP $2000 for a RTX 5090). That seems significant... until you realize that that 10% is what would prevent that $2000 GPU from turning into a ruined $0 brick when the connector inevitably melts. All of a sudden, that 10% increase seems like a bargain.

[rawling]

> I still have to sit there stressing out because I have no idea if the PSU<->Mobo power connector is seated properly

I recently switched my PSU and my onboard audio volume halved.

There's no way I'm going to switch back to see if the problem goes away because that connector was such a **ache to undo and reconnect.

[mmis1000]

Even a middle school teacher will tell you put large amount of current over a wire is an bad idea though. Remember P=I2R? It should be in the first few class that you learn about electricity.

And nvidia engineers decides to put current originally carried by 24wire (or even 32) into a 12wire connector without change the connector size. Wow it's so surprising that it would burn.

I just don't understand how the f*k the whole thing get approved at first place. It's just insane.

[knowitnone]

power requirements of GPU cards are increasing with each generation and pushing power to them become more difficult. Electricity through wire causes heat. More power = more heat resulting in things melting. Even the cable would melt(or explode) if high enough current runs through it. People here are talking about 48 volts instead of 12 volts which is one solution. But more cabling to distribute the current would be easier.

[soramimo]

Part of it is likely backward compatibility.

[hoseja]

Electrical engineers are extremely proud when they can enshittify a $1000 article by replacing a ¢15 component with a ten times worse ¢12 component.