A few months ago we reported that PCI-SIG has introduced a new power plug standard for high-powered graphics cards called 12V-2×6 which will replace the 12VHPWR power plug that was introduced when the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4000 series of graphics cards were introduced.
The 12VHPWR plug appears to present a serious problem, where it must be installed correctly, or the user's graphics card will burn. Further complicating matters is that these 12VHPWR plugs have poor quality construction, as there is a limit to how many times these plugs can be plugged in before they break.
With this 12V-2×6 plug, PCI-SIG says that they have fixed all the shortcomings of the 12VHPWR plug, and it was recently tested by HardwareBusters with a 640W power supply when loosely attached, and in short, all the reported updates seem to has been well done.
The main thing is that the new pins used in the new plug will limit the amount of power that goes through it when it detects that the plug is not installed correctly. This ensures that the plug does not experience overheating issues, and will not cause a fire to the graphics card components.
NVIDIA has already updated their graphics card with this new plug on their NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card, and it is expected that their NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 graphics card will also receive the same treatment.