AMD Likely to Ditch the 16-pin Gen 5 Connector as GeForce RTX 4090 Power Adapters Pop and Burn

AMD will retain the 8-pin power plugs instead of the new 16-pin PCIe Gen 5 “12VHPWR” connector. In the last few days, there have been multiple incidents of the latter burning and melting on AIB GeForce RTX 4090 cards. The upcoming Radeon RX 7900 XT will come with two 8-pin power connectors which should be sufficient to satisfy its 300W or so TGP.

AMD is putting a lot of emphasis on power efficiency, promising a 50% performance per watt uplift with the RDNA 3 graphics architecture. The addition of 3D stacked L3 cache, wider WGPs, and the TSMC N5 5nm process are all directed at improving the same.