The arrival of the fifth generation PCIe brings us two important novelties, on the one hand the new 12-pin power connector for PCI Express 5.0 graphics cards that will make you have to renew your power supply. On the other hand, Samsung’s Q-Release to facilitate installation on their new motherboards.
The consumption of graphics cards has been increasing progressively since their appearance, not only due to the fact that a higher bandwidth requires more energy, but also the GPU and VRAM that are inside. With the last generations of NVIDIA and AMD reaching almost the limit of consumption in the fourth generation of the standard, a jump in energy consumption was to be expected and with it a new connector for PCI Express 5.0.
New PCI Express 5.0 connector confirmed
The graphics cards that we will see in 2022, and that will use the PCI Express 5.0 interface to communicate with the rest of the PC, are gradually becoming a reality. Among them is the new PCI Express power connector with greater capacity than the already known 8 and 6-pin connectors.
This means that the power supplies or PSUs are going to have to increase power and a proof of this is in the new ASUS ROG Thor models that have just been presented, with the models Platinum II from 1000 and 1200 W and the mighty 1600W Titanium. All of them stand out for bringing as standard the new power connector for PCI Express 5.0 graphics cards.
The new connector will be 12 pins and is designed to deliver up to 600 W of power to graphics cards that make use of the PCI Express standard. Which will not only allow models with higher clock speeds, but also much faster memories. In any case, the result is none other than that your power supply has been totally out of date if you want to jump to the next generation and the following years seem to be a clean slate.
Its release date? This coming November with the 850W version dated for next year.
The ASUS Q-Release connector, will it be standard?
In some of the motherboards with ASUS Z690 chipset, the Taiwanese manufacturer has integrated a slot for graphics cards called PCIe Slot Q-Release. Which is nothing more than a fifth-generation PCI Express slot, but with a Quick Release button or in other words, an exclusive mechanism that allows you to disconnect the GPU without having to force yourself, yes, do it when the computer is not on. we don’t want to hear bad news.
And yes, we say exclusive due to the fact that we have not seen it, for the moment, in the motherboards of other manufacturers, although the idea has seemed excellent to us and we believe that it should be adopted within the standard.
ASUS Q-Release – this is neat! pic.twitter.com/qCJlzo3s17
– Andreas Schilling (@aschilling) October 27, 2021
At the moment, the motherboards that have this interesting variant of the PCI Express slot are:
- ASUS ROG MAXIMUS Z690 EXTREME
- ASUS ROG MAXIMUS Z690 FORMULA
- ASUS ROG MAXIMUS Z690 APEX
- ASUS ROG MAXIMUS Z690 HERO
- ASUS ROG STRIX Z690-A
- ASUS ROG STRIX Z690-E
- ASUS ROG STRIX Z690-F
The rest of ASUS motherboards have not incorporated it at the moment. What do you think of this innovation?
