PCI-e 4.0 cards may not require connection to power – Update

The socket of the new PCI Express standard must have at least four times as much power compared to its predecessor. That would mean that in the future, PCI Express 4.0 video cards may not require a direct connection to a power supply.

Update August 25: The PCI Express 4.0 standard, like PCI-E 3.0, will deliver a maximum of 75 watts via the slot on the motherboard. Statements that the new standard would deliver 300 watts or more have turned out to be incorrect.

The original article:

In an interview with Tom’s Hardware, Richard Solomon, vice president of the pci special interest group, says that pci-express 4.0 will soon be able to deliver a minimum of 300 watts, but that could also be 400 or 500 watts. The topic came up when Tom’s Hardware noticed that a previously shown AMD server motherboard, which uses an early version of pci-express 4.0, has significantly more power connectors on board than is usual.

The board has four eight-pin and two six-pin connectors in addition to the existing motherboard and processor connectors. It is unclear whether this design will be permanent and consumers themselves will have to run six extra cables to their motherboard.

PCI-express 3.0, currently the latest available standard, delivers up to 75 watts. In practice, it can now be seen that only fairly modest low-end video cards can handle only the power that the PCI-e 3.0 slot has. All other cards require support from the power supply. The mentioned three hundred watts would be enough to run the most powerful video cards of the moment without extra power connections. It was previously known that pci-express 4.0 will have a bitrate twice as large as 3.0: 16GT/s.