In the world of powerful PC hardware, there is one painful topic that only the lazy don’t talk about: overheating and melting of power connectors such as 12VHPWR and newer 12V-2×6. This problem was faced by owners of powerful graphics cards such as NVIDIA RTX 5090, RTX 5080 or RTX 4090. And while manufacturers are constantly improving cables, these problems are not going away. At Computex 2025, Seasonic showed off its approach to solving this painful issue — with the new generation of Prime series power supplies.
It turns out that it’s not just the quality of the cables or «crooked hands» when connecting that causes overheating. The main problem is the load on the power line, which varies depending on the behavior of the video card. This can cause voltage or current surges that heat the wires to critical temperatures. As a result, not only the cables melt, but also the precious video cards.
Seasonic claims to have found a solution to this problem with a two-stage protection system. The company is integrating a set of sensors, a microcontroller, and firmware into its new power supplies that constantly monitor voltage and current. But the main thing is that the new system will be able to detect overheating or overcurrent on the 12V-2×6 connector in time.
The first level of protection — the user receives a signal via an external device (which can be connected to the PSU) that will warn of a potential problem.
The second level is hardware. If the temperature or current threshold is exceeded, the power supply will shut down the system on its own to prevent damage to the components. Such an emergency shutdown may ruin the game, rendering, or file copying process, but it’s still better to lose a few minutes than a few thousand dollars. On the other hand, if an abnormal shutdown damages an SSD or HDD with valuable data at the same time, it will definitely do more harm than good.
It’s worth noting that this solution will only be available in next-generation power supplies. The development is expected to be completed by the end of this year. New Seasonic Prime power supplies with this technology will go on sale in the first quarter of 2026. The price tag has not yet been announced, but we can expect that the new features and components will increase the cost of the already expensive Prime models.
Seasonic’s solution does not eliminate the source of the problem, but it significantly reduces the risk of damage to expensive components due to overheating. This is another step towards making modern PCs safer and more reliable. If this technology really works as promised, it could become the new standard in top-of-the-line power supplies next year.
Source: tomshardware
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