AMD Radeon RX 7000 cards reportedly do not use a PCIe Gen5 “12VHPWR” connector

No 12VHPWR connector on RDNA3 GPUs?

Multiple sources are now claiming that AMD won’t be adding a new PCIe Gen5 power connector to its new Radeon GPUs.

Kyle Bennett recently revealed RDNA3 Navi 31 GPU will support (at the time) unannounced specification DisplayPort 2.1, only for VESA officially announced 2.1 Specifications after a few days.

According to Kyle’s sources, AMD does not plan to add a PCIe Gen5 power connector to the new Navi 31 reference cards, in fact, it hasn’t been confirmed which board partner card uses this connector either.

This news comes just like NVIDIA face reports About the melting of 16-pin power connectors in 450W GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards. The company adopted a 12-pin power connector for its RTX 30 Founders Edition GPUs in 2020, only for the new ‘Ada’ series that is fully implemented with 12+4pin and defined by the 12VHPWR specification and delivers up to 600 watts of power.

As a matter of fact, Cale’s claim is not the only one. she was Angistronomy who were the first to break the news that AMD is not planning to use the new power connector in its reference designs. The company will rely on dual 8-pin power connectors on its Navi 3X-based model:

The reference card appears to have an updated 3-fan design that is slightly longer than the previous generation, with 3 distinct red stripes on part of the heatsink fins near the dual 8-pin connectors.

– Anastronomical science

The site correctly mentioned 3 red stripes on the reference design, which AMD revealed in late August. However, AMD’s official rendering did not show any power connector:

AMD RDNA3 Reference Design, Source: AMD

There is also a report from Igor Lab Which revealed the PCB design for the upcoming RDNA3 GPU, which will likely be a custom variant. This card reportedly contains 3-pin 8-pin power connectors. With that in mind, there are now three sources with a relatively track record claiming that AMD does not use the 12VHPWR connector on RDNA3 GPUs.

If these reports are correct, NVIDIA will still be the only company to use this new high-power connector. That’s despite Intel and AMD releasing new cards for desktop computers around the same time.

source: Kyle BennettAnd the Angistronomy