Recently, when pictures of new 2024 motherboards for new CPUs began to appear online, many noticed the addition of a new 8-pin PCIe power connection on the bottom of specific boards. Located on the opposite end of the main motherboard and CPU power plugin, this led to speculation about what it could be for.
Is it for the upcoming release of the GeForce RTX 5090 and GeForce RTX 5080? NVIDIA's next-gen flagship graphics cards are rumored (from multiple credible sources) to require 600W and 400W of power, respectively. Or, is it to compensate for the dramatic increase in CPU power consumption in recent years - precisely, on the Intel side of the fence?
The answer is yes, no, all of the above, and more. During a recent visit to MSI's factory in Shenzhen, China, where we saw MEG Z890 ACE, PRO Z890-A WIFI, MAG Z890 TOMAHAWK WIFI, and MPG Z890 CARBON WIFI, we asked one of the company's leading engineers and designers about the new connector to find out what it's used for.
The short answer is that it's simply there to provide more power as needed, primarily when the motherboard's full capabilities and capacity for storage, memory, and external devices are being used. With a high-end CPU, fast DDR5 memory, PCIe Gen 5 SSDs, Gen 4 SSDs, USB 4, Thunderbolt, and a high-powered GeForce RTX 40 Series or 50 Series card connected, having that additional headroom makes sense.
It's not a requirement, but enough to ensure that power delivery doesn't become problematic when a system goes all-out in all areas. Although we didn't have any sort of confirmation that the GeForce RTX 5090 at 600W was real, you can see how this additional connection would come in handy when the 16-pin 12VHPWR connector tops out at 600W - this would put a lot of pressure to ensure that the PCIe slot has that 75W max to play with
So yeah, the additional power will go where it's needed to ensure that your new cutting-edge PC rig keeps doing what it's doing.