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Comment by ohdeargodno | Hacker News Reader

Nitpicking it doesn't change the fact that the 12v2x6 connector _also_ burns down.

The guy accuses Nvidia of not doing anything about that problem, but ignored that they did with the 12V-2x6 connector, which as far as I can tell, has had far fewer issues.

It still has no fusing, sensing, or load balancing for the individual wires. It is a fire waiting to happen.

It is a connector. None of the connectors inside a PC have those. They could add them to the circuitry on the PCB side of the connector, but that is entirely separate from the connector.

That said, the industry seems to be moving to adding detection into the PSU, given seasonic’s announcement:

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/power-supplies/se...

Finally, I think there is a simpler solution, which is to change the cable to use two large gauge wires instead of 12 individual ones to carry current. That would eliminate the need for balancing the wires in the first place.

Previous well-designed video cards used the technologies I described. Eliminating the sense circuits and fusing is a recent development.

I do like the idea of just using big wires. It’d be so much cleaner and simpler. Also using 24 or 48V would be nice, but that’d be an even bigger departure from current designs.

> Previous well-designed video cards used the technologies I described. Eliminating the sense circuits and fusing is a recent development.

My point is that the PCB is where such features would be present, not the connector. There are connectors that have fusing. The UK’s AC power plugs are examples of them. The connectors inside PCs are not.

Oh, sure, I’m not proposing that the connector itself should have those features, rather that it shouldn’t be used without them present on the device.

The 50 series connectors burned up too. The issue was not fixed.

It seems incredibly wrong to assume that there was only 1 issue with 12WHPWR. 12V-2x6 was an improvement that eliminated some potential issues, not all of them. If you want to eliminate all of them, replace the 12 current carrying wires with 2 large gauge wires. Then the wires cannot become unbalanced. Of course, the connector would need to split the two into 12 very short wires to be compatible, but those would be recombined on the GPU’s PCB into a single wire.

(context: 12VHPWR and 12V-2x6 are the exact same thing. The latter is supposed to be improved and totally fixed, complete with the underspecced load-bearing "supposed to be" clause.)

They are not the exact same thing.

https://www.corsair.com/us/en/explorer/diy-builder/power-sup...

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