GPU "Cable Gate" is an official thing now. This week a Redditor posted images of a melted 12-pin adapter cable on their Nvidia RTX 4090. The power plug on the PCB was also irreversibly damaged as ...

Editor Andreas Schilling posted a tweet showing the new 12-pin connector next to the standard dual 8-pin connectors used on high-end graphics cards. As you can see, the new Nvidia connector is tiny.

If you want some solid evidence that NVIDIA's making real-world changes that'll affect the way you need to build a computer, look to the 12-pin GPU power connector.

It's been a while since we needed a new graphics card power connector. Both AMD and Nvidia have typically made do with pairs of 6-pin and 8-pin connectors in various configurations.

Nvidia introduced a new single 12-pin connector with its Founder Edition 30-series cards last year. Nvidia's reasoning at the time was that it wanted a smaller connector on the card itself.

The 16-pin power connector, used in many of today’s best graphics cards, continues to be a headache with multiple reports of melting connectors on both the GPU and PSU ends.