MSI will start bundling colour-coded 12V-2×6 cable adapters with its upcoming Nvidia GeForce RTX 50 Series graphics cards to ensure proper connections and thus user safety. Now with a glance, you can see if your hardware is correctly installed.
MSI has unveiled a slight change to its 12V-2×6 to 8-pin cable adapter that should make them more novice-friendly. Like its PSUs, these adapters feature yellow-painted power pins which make them visible when the cable isn’t fully seated. This way, even if you don’t own one of MSI’s PSUs that feature colour-coded cables you can still have that extra peace of mind.
For those unfamiliar, the first version of 12V-2×6, called 12VHPWR, faced some issues capable of starting a fire in some cases. Improper installation or manufacturing defects occasionally caused the connector to overheat and melt. Not surprising when you consider that up to 600W can travel through its wires instead of being spread among four regular 8-pin cables. Fortunately, the newer 12V-2×6 connector is much safer thanks to its sense pins, which detect how much power is going through it.
The brand is offering two variants of these adapters, a single 12V-2×6 to triple 8-pin and a single 12V-2×6 to quad 8-pin. The former will be bundled with RTX 5080 and RTX 5070 Ti class cards, while the latter will be offered with the power-hungry RTX 5090. On the other hand, RTX 5070 is out of luck, getting just a regular full-black 12V-2×6 to dual 8-pin. This isn’t a big deal by any means since the RTX 5070 takes only 250W compared to the RTX 5090’s 575W. That said, if you own an ATX 3.0 PSU, these cables won’t change anything since you would use the included 12V-2×6 cable instead of this adapter.
While this change won’t make the connector less sensitive, it should nullify user errors. All you need is to double-check if any colour is visible after installing your graphics card cable, and you should be good to go. More safety checks are always welcome especially if they are simple to verify. So, kudos to MSI for this small yet important attention to detail.
