Laurence Malcom
at Recent press release From Gigabyte, the company has announced an all-new power supply, called the UD1000GM that has been specifically optimized for the next generation of PCIe 5.0 graphics cards coming in the future. The crucial feature to support these new GPUs is the inclusion of a new 16-pin power connection on the UD1000M, which Gigabyte appears to say will be equipped in all of these future GPUs.
We reported on a 16-pin power connector late last year. The new connector is intended to be a complete replacement for traditional 8-pin and 6-pin power connectors to power the next generation of PCIe 5.0 GPUs and at the same time reduce cable clutter. Although the new connector has 16 pins, the overall size of the connector is greatly reduced, making its shape similar to a conventional 8-pin factor.
However, the 16-pin power output is greatly improved with a whopping 600W of power from just one connector. For reference, today’s regular main graphics card features three 8-pin power connectors that can only handle up to 450 watts combined (150 watts per connector). This would give 16 pins more room than enough height to power future GPUs if power consumption trends remain similar to the RTX 30 series and RX 6000 series.
The 16-pin connector favors strict PCIe 5.0 compatibility, which means we’ll probably never see this connector on a PCIe Gen 4 GPU. The Gigabyte wording also seems to say the same in its press release for the UD1000GM. Note that older, more traditional power supplies will need an 8-pin to 16-pin 3-pin adapter to support PCIe 5.0 graphics cards as a whole.
This may mean that a 16-pin connector may be a requirement for any graphics card that wants to use the PCIe 5.0 specification. If true, users who want to upgrade to these future GPUs will either need to upgrade the PSU or purchase one of these adapters mentioned by Gigabyte.
But this idea may also be wrong. At this time, we don’t know for sure if 16-pin is a specific requirement for PCIe Gen 5 support. But it seems likely that that may be the case.
Fortunately, power supplies like the UD1000GM are already being rolled out with the new 16-pin power connector. A month ago, Asus also announced a new PSU lineup that will also feature a 16-pin connector, called ROG Loki. With power supplies already adopting the new standard today, we should see plenty of flagships ready in time for the arrival of the next generation of GPUs – like the RTX 40 series.
