And up to 850W power supply requirement.

Those of you who have picked up a modern video card in the past several years have probably already had to deal with the dual 8-pin power connectors. Nvidia has reportedly been working on a new 12-pin PCIe power adapter for their upcoming Ampere (30xx series) lineup of cards. This will take that existing 2x8-pin connector and shrink it down to a single 12-pin connector.

Andreas Schilling over at HardwareLuxx received a Seasonic made connector. As you can see from his tweet (embedded below), the new 12-pin connector is considerably smaller than the 2x8-pin connectors. In fact, it looks to be about the same size as just one of those 8-pin connectors.


Seasonic is reportedly calling the new connector the "Nvidia 2-pin PCIe Molex Micro-Fit 3.0 Connector." This seems to indicate that it's very much an Nvidia only thing (for now) and presumably will come into play starting with the Nvidia 30xx series.

According to the box provided by Seasonic, the power connector has a recommended wattage capacity of 850W or more for use with the cable. This is presumably also what the graphics card will require that goes along with it. As PC Gamer points out, Intel is also looking to make some significant changes to the motherboard power connectors in the near future. This would "take away the burden of 3.3V and 5V conversion off the PSU and integrate it into the motherboard" itself.

Does this mean you will need to run out and grab one of these brand new power supplies if you plan on picking up an Ampere GPU? Well, maybe not. It is expected that Nvidia and third-party manufacturers will include some sort of an adapter cable with their new cards. There is no guarantee of this, of course. This is also assuming you have a powerful enough PSU to even power the upcoming Ampere cards and the rest of your components.

Power requirements aren't the only thing you might have to worry about for the 30xx cards. If this leak is to be believed, the RTX 3090 card (top of the line for Ampere), will be one big chungus of a card. Here it is when compared to the reference RTX 2080. It is rumored to be 310mm and take up 2.75 slots in your machine.