AMD Radeon RX 9070 graphics cards to stick with 8-pin power connectors

AMD's upcoming Radeon RX 9070 XT is back in the rumour mill, with fresh leaks suggesting a power-hungry design and a potential return to a triple 8-pin power connector configuration.

Benchlife (via VideoCardz) recently reported on rumours surrounding the power consumption of AMD's next-generation RDNA 4 graphics cards, specifically the RX 9070 series. The leaks suggest that the RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 will have a Total Board Power (TBP) of around 260W for reference designs, with custom models potentially reaching up to 330W.

The report also claims that AMD will not be mandating using the new 12VHPWR (12V-2×6) power connector for its RX 9000 series. This differs from Nvidia's approach with its RTX 40 series (and probably the RTX 50 series, too), which adopted the 12VHPWR connector and continues to do so, even after the melting connector issues that plagued the RTX 4090's launch. Instead of the 12VHPWR connector, Benchlife suggests that the Radeon RX 9070 XT might feature three 8-pin power connectors as most RX 7900 series cards do.

However, this doesn't necessarily mean we won't see any RX 9000 series cards with the new connector. For example, ASRock demonstrated that it's possible to implement it on AMD's GPUs by launching some RX 7000 series cards with the 12VHPWR connector.

AMD is expected to announce the new GPUs at CES 2025 and launch them in late January. As such, we won't have to wait much longer to confirm what power connectors the new cards will use.

KitGuru says: If you had to choose a Radeon RX 9070 series graphics card, would it matter to you what type of power connector it uses? If so, which would you prefer?

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