GPU Power Adapters With Heatsinks And Fans Surface And No, This Is Not Satire

The picture above is not a Photoshop job—or at least, if it is, we didn't make it. It comes from a Taobao listing for a listing that Google assures us is "RTX4090 Graphics Card Adapter 16PIN 180 Degree Graphics Card Power Steering Head Turbo Cooling 4080/4070." Notably, the listing makes no mention of the GeForce RTX 5090, meaning it almost assuredly predates the new GPUS and highlighting that these connectors melting has been a problem for a while.

Sadly, the Taobao listing has no other images and there are no reviews for the seller, so it may not even be real, even though the product does look plausible, and even kind of cool. The ability to see the power consumed by your GPU in real time is a nifty feature, although it would probably be short to some degree as the PCI Express slot can deliver up to 75 watts itself, or 84 watts if you're AMD.


If you're not willing to stick a tiny, whining fan on your graphics card's power connector, you might be able to get by with just an aluminum heatsink. This product, from EZDIY-FAB is described as a "Shield PCIe 5.0 GPU Angle Adapter-90 Degrees Std" and is exactly what it appears to be: an aluminum heatsink around a 90-degree 12V-2x6 power connector. And it is specifically intended to be a heatsink, which we know because of this image from the vendor:


How did we get to this point, exactly, where we need fans and heatsinks for our power cables? Well, it's simple: the 12VHPWR and 12V-2X6 connectors are poorly-engineered. We feel confident in saying that because we're not the only ones saying it; respected voices in the community have spoken up to declare that the new high-power plug endorsed by NVIDIA is simply unsafe without careful design of the power delivery hardware that the cable connects to, and the lack of load balancing on NVIDIA's recent GPUs is exactly not that.