At Gamescom 2024, MSI presented several of its new motherboards. One in particular caught the eye of visitors: the MPG X870E Carbon. This board is obviously a top-of-the-range performer. The board features a 20-phase VRM solution, breaking down into 18 2 1’s. On this board there are two PCIe 5.0 x16 slots, one PCIe 4.0 x16 slot and four M.2 slots. We immediately noticed that MSI has added a dedicated 8-Pin power connector at the bottom to power the PCIe lanes. This connector should supplement the power requirements of the Gen5 lanes present on the motherboard. Obviously, it seems perfectly suited to the needs of future graphics cards.
This trend should not be limited to MSI, and seems more specifically dedicated to the power requirements of NVIDIA’s next-generation RTX 50 GPUs, or those of AMD’s next-generation GPUs. Without wishing to speculate too much, this solution could aim to “relieve” the 12VHPWR connector. We can imagine that, with a voltage distribution, the connector will heat up less and could avoid a number of the problems we saw some time ago.
An 8-Pin connector to prevent overheating?
For the moment, MSI and Asus (with its X870E ROG Crosshair HERO) seem to be going down this road. Coming back to MSI, the brand will offer this connector on all its X870E motherboards and even on some X870 models, notably the MPG Carbon WIFI, MEG ACE and MEG GODLIKE. The launch of AMD’s new motherboards is scheduled for September 30, so it’s likely that we’ll see more models. It will also be interesting to see whether this trend is extended to Intel motherboards. The solution seems to be exclusively GPU-related, so it seems likely that future Intel boards will also feature this connector.
