There is a fairly significant amount of cases where users found their 12V-2×6 connector burnt or melt, and several designs like the L-shaped connector and highlighted pins haven’t been successful at solving this problem. What if the cable has a temperature sensor so users would know if it fails? That’s what ASRock has built with its new 12V-2×6 cables.
ASRock’s Answer To Melting 12V-2×6 Cables
You probably never heard of ASRock making power supplies, but they do – in this case, some of the recent PSUs from the brand has this type of cable with an embedded resistor called NTC sensor (NTC stands for Negative Temperature Coefficient), which decreases its resistance as temperature increases. This kind of sensor is already in use in many PC components, so having one in a cable as temperamental as 12V-2×6 would certainly be a big help.
That said, having a dedicated sensor means this specific cable also has two additional pins to send the sensor data back to the PC – as such, the temperature sensing only works with ASRock Taichi and Phantom Gaming series PSUs that features the 2-pin receptors. As an additional safety feature, the pins are highlighted in light green color to easily identify proper insertion, although with the known case of similarly-designed cable from MSI getting burnt, this approach may not be entirely effective.
With virtually all the failures of 12V-2×6 (and by extension, 12VHPWR) tracing back to cables overheating, having an active sensor with the capability to perform a thermal shutdown can be very effective at preventing cable damage, or even GPU/PSU damage. Perhaps PCI-SIG can consider this sensor as part of the updated standard, or better yet, take a better look at the connector design to avoid all these issues altogether without the need of additional components, which certainly will drive up PSU’s prices.
Pokdepinion: This may be an effective fix for what is, in my opinion, a fundamentally flawed connector design.
