| 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. |