MSI is currently showcasing a new PCIe 5.0 ATX 3.0 power supply at Computex 2023 called the MAG A850GL, and according to coverage from PC World’s Gordon Mah Ung, the PSU includes a brilliant (and, perhaps, obvious) feature that should ensure GeForce RTX 40 Series users are plugging their connectors in correctly and avoiding the potential melting of their pricey GPU parts. As demonstrated in a new video hosted by Ung, MSI’s MAG A850GL ATX 3.0 PSU comes with a 12VHPWR power cable that features a yellow rather than black connector at the end, a clever feature that should help even the most careless enthusiast ascertain whether the cable is fully plugged in or not. Time will tell whether other PSU manufacturers decide to steal this feature, but MSI’s option, which is fully modular, will launch in July for $139.
From a YouTube transcript:
You take this, you plug it into your 12 volt high power connector like this and it’s inserted correctly. How do I know this? Because I don’t see the yellow showing, because I’m just going to, like, pull on this a little bit. You see that yellow? It’s obvious. It’s obvious to me that this is not fully seated. Yes, it’s locked into place, but you can actually see we’re like one and a half, almost two millimeters of gap on that connector under heavy load. That might be a problem. Might not. But honestly, I would say this is not fully seated and it’s on both ends because, look, this is one end, this is the other.
And I’m going to take a fully black cable, which is what you usually see. […] So it’s plugged in, it’s locked in. But let me just kind of wiggle it a little bit. Honestly. Is that fully seated or not fully seated? I would say that cable should probably be pushed in again. But honestly, when this is buried in the guts of your case and you’ve been pulling on this cable to make it nice and neat, you can see that you might be able to get that one and a half millimeters out and you wouldn’t be able to tell because the connector is all black on black, on black.
Now let’s do this again with the yellow to show you how cool this is. So again, I would take our yellow cable, push it in fully seated, unseated. Right. That’s just enough gap that I probably would want to push it in. No yellow, it’s safe, and that is really clever because frankly we’re seeing more reports of “my GPU melted.” We’re not really sure what is going on, but at the heart of it, you could assume that maybe they didn’t really fully seat it in. The simple thing of just simply making this connector a little bit yellow at the end might be enough to reduce all that heartache that people are going to get. And again, MSI’s MAG A850GL has done this. Pretty clever, I would imagine other people might do this soon too. It’s going to cost $139 when it comes out in July.