Based off the original report from Videocardz, many have gotten concerned over the lifespan of included adapters of RTX 4000 series videocards, with the focus on Zotac. The concern came from the following note on Zotac’s site:
4x 8-pin-to-12VHPWR cable (limited service life with up to 30 connect / disconnects
This rating from Zotac is fully correct. The issue is that people expect ratings to be way higher… they’re not. If we check the datasheet from Amphenol on the 12VHPWR terminal, we see the exact same rating of 30 “mating cycles”. This rating is extremely conservative and mechanically this connector has shown to easily triple this rating in testing.
This isn’t even something limited to this connector or even Amphenol. Case and point, I’ll take the example of one of the most used connectors in PSUs: Molex Minifit. Having a rating in the range of 75-100 mating cycles, this doesn’t exactly look great… But when was the last time you had a connector fail on you? It’s really not something that happens often, but companies still choose to keep the mechanical rating low to shift blame.
So long story short, don’t worry… Your next GPU will be fine.
