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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

The old mini-fit connector had evolved to be kind of sketchy - a six-pin connector with two pins you hold on the side to turn it into an 8-pin connector? Not pretty.

And the new connector also adds 'sideband pins' so the power supply can tell the card how much power is available. That should reduce problems with random shutdowns due to drawing too much power.

With that said, a connector that melts clearly isn't an improvement.

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The 8-pin connector is also just an outdated design. It's unnecessarily bulky, and rated at a measly 150 W. The idea wasn't for you to put 4 of these (32 pins and wires) together to power a single device.

For reference, an Anderson PP45 connector pair (from 1966!) is smaller than the original 8-pin connector and would handle 660 W at 12V reliably at up to 10000 cycles (and can even handle hot-unplug).

Yup, was thinking Anderson connectors as well -- I use one to power my trolling motor.

New modular PSUs come with both 6+2- and 8-pin cables. OEM PCs and eGPUs still come with 6+2 cables for compatibility reasons IIRC.

FWIW I just helped build a new PC and the Seasonic PX PSU used only had 6+2 cables in the box

Weird, I bought multiple Corsair RMx PSUs over the years and they came with both versions. I guess it wasn't as widespread as I thought.

"a six-pin connector with two pins you hold on the side to turn it into an 8-pin connector"

No, most modern PSUs come with solid 8 pin connectors (as well as 6+2 pin connectors that you mention). If you watch the YouTube PC building channels, you'll see no one uses the latter for cards with 8 pin connector.

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