One of the controversies that has created the most rivers of ink is NVIDIA’s commitment to the PCIe 5.0 connector, also know as 12VHWPR or 16-pin, in the entire range of RTX 40 graphics cards that come with GPUs with Lovelace architecture. The reason? Its justification when the TDP of the graphics card is very high, but it stops making sense at much lower consumption. In the end, a pulse carried out by the assemblers has led to a change in the RTX 4070.
There are only a few weeks left for the launch of the RTX 4070 and when it seemed that we already knew everything, except the final price, news appeared that surprised us for good. And it is that although we understand the need for a new connector for very high consumption powers, our beloved 6-pin and 8-pin connectors have been reliable for years and we do not see the need to replace them with something that in certain scenarios does not provide more than what it already has. existing.
There will be models of the NVIDIA RTX 4070 without the PCIe 5.0 connector
One of the peculiarities of the 16-pin connector, or 12+4, which has been recently launched for graphics cards and which is currently only used by NVIDIA, is that it can not only give a specific power, as is the case with those of 6 pins, 75 W, and 8 pins, 150 W. But it can give several different levels in the same cable.
The fact is that the 12VHPWR connector not only supports powers of 450 W and 600 W, but also supports them of 300 W and 150 W. If we talk about the case of 300 W, we can supply this with a double 8-pin connector . In principle, it would not make sense to use the new power port. However, if we think at scale and take into account the amount of cables saved for assemblers, then we have a small savings there. However, this is lost if we talk about having to feed 150 W to the graphics card, since then, we are competing with a single 8-pin cable.
Well, this is what many of the assemblers of the RTX 4070 have thought, since many of the custom models will not use the PCIe 5.0 connector for the simple fact that it is not necessary and would result in an extra cost for the end user. Let’s not forget that we are talking about a graphics card that will surely have a TDP of around 220-250 W. We are not talking about the top of the range that consumes twice as much and, therefore, a high-power power supply is not needed in the PC I’m going to ride it.
The real incentive on the part of the assemblers
The reason behind this is that custom graphics card manufacturers are not willing to pay NVIDIA extra for the adapter to be able to use the PCIe 5.0 connector on their graphics cards and more with power that does not justify it. This would explain why the RTX 4070, despite being a trimmed variant of the RTX 4070 Ti, is going to take three months to come out. More than anything due to the fact that these have decided not to go through the funnel of having to place the connector in order to financially benefit Jen Hsen Huang’s company and the same can be said of the RTX 4060 that will use less power.
The use of the 8-pin connector also implies some changes in the operation of the analog circuitry of the motherboard, which is in charge of managing the power supply of the different components. Which also explains the delay for a graphics card, which although it will be released on April 12 of this year, should have been presented at the beginning of the year.