MSI has a simple solution for 12VHPWR cable problems

May 07, 2023

All it took was some ingenuity and a bit of yellow plastic.

MSI 12VHPWR cable with yellow connector, Source: PCWorld

MSI has developed a two-color connector for high-power GPUs utilizing the 12+4 (16-pin) cable. The horror stories about melting connectors that were later explained as user error are something we all remember. Some people had difficulty fitting the cable all the way into the connector, which was a direct cause of cables overheating and melting.

As demonstrated by PCWorld, who visited the MSI booth at Computex 2023 fair in Taipei, the company might have just ‘solved’ this problem. The company developed a yellow connector cable for its modular power modules. The idea is rather simple, as long as the user can see the yellow part, then the cable is not inserted correctly. The only way to hide the yellow part is by plugging the cable all the way in until there is only the black part of the cable is visible.

Correctly and Incorrectly plugged connector, Source: PCWorld

PCWorld were given two cables to demonstrate how this works and an MSI MAG 850GL PCIe Gen5 ATX3.0 power supply. The supply is not relevant here because this cable can be used by any MSI product, and it is designed to be two-sided. This means that the yellow part will act as a safety measure not only for the supply but also for the graphics card, which is probably more important to note anyway.

This novel idea for the high-power GPU cable is also very cheap to implement by other vendors. It requires no major changes to the design of the connector, while it ensures that users are plugging the cables correctly. If only NVIDIA came up with this idea sooner.

Source: PCWorld via Overclock3D