Molex 16 Pin Wire Connector, Harley BLACK Waterproof, Sealed Kit, MX150

Product Information

It replaces the 12-pin plug that was on previous GeForce RTX 30 series Founders Edition cards and can provide up to an incredible 600W of power to the GPU. In comparison, older 8-pin connectors only supply up to 150W each.

We at Tom's Hardware haven't tried any third-party cables. ATX 3.0 PSUs should work, as those cables don't require adapters for the 16-pin connector. However, there are still at least a couple of reports of direct PSU connections melting.It's unclear whether third-party graphics card companies hold the same rules about warranties and third-party connectors. But Nvidia has said that any user with an issue will have an expedited RMA. So far the melting 16-pin connector issue was affecting mostly the GPU side as you can see in the image above. However, we now have the first case of a Reddit user Shiftyeyes67k who had a 16-pin melt on the SMPS side. The affected model happens to be a 1000W Dark Power 13 from Be Quiet. The new connector helps eliminate the use of multiple 6-pin or 8-pin PCIe cables, decreasing cable clutter and making cable management easier. Nevertheless, the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti can also be powered by three 8-pin PCIe cables, although it would be a lot more unwieldy. AMD doesn't use 16-pin connectors–at least not yet. When it launches its next-gen GPUs, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT, both will use dual 8-pin power connectors, which means that people won't have to deal with adapters at all. What about older cards with 12-pin adapters? MSI recently came up with a simple yet somewhat effective solution for the issue, where it showed off bright yellow colored 16-pin power connectors. The idea is that the yellow-colored pins will not be visible to the user once the connector is properly seated (via PCWorld YouTube).

Updated 10/26/2022 9:00 pm PT: Added the relevant information about the usage of third-party adapters from Nvidia documentation included with the GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition.Prior to that official statement, there were plenty of theories (some of which, it seems, ended up being right.) The 16-pin connector is largely the same, but it adds four extra "sense pins" that can communicate with the power supply. In our experience, the 16-pin connector does require a bit more force to fully insert. Multiple theories suggest the root cause may be improperly inserted connectors, perhaps pulled out after doing some cable management. But there is no hard proof as yet that this is the only possible cause. Bottom Line Nvidia has suggested that the issue is caused because 16-pin adapters are not being plugged completely into the graphics card. Our findings to date suggest that a common issue is that connectors are not fully plugged into the graphics card. To help ensure the connector is secure we recommend plugging the power dongle into the graphics card first to ensure it's firmly and evenly plugged in, before plugging the graphics card into the motherboard.