ASUS Thor PSU won’t supply 600W of power through PCIe Gen5 connector
ASUS’s first PCIe Gen5 power supplies won’t be 100% compliant with the new standard.
Earlier this week it was discovered that the ASUS 12-pin cable which is supposedly the Gen5 Ready, is actually the same cable that NVIDIA ships for its GeForce RTX 30 Founders Edition graphics cards. However, there is a small twist to this story.
It appears that we might finally know the difference between the PCIe Gen5 12-pin power cable and the 12+4-pin version. The latter is the full spec cable offering 12 pins alongside special 4 data signal paths. Those data pins are required to be fully compliant with the PCI-SIG’s “12VHPWR High Power Connector (H+)” standard, the supposed new high-power connector for next-gen GPUs.
In order to supply more than 450W of power, the cable must have one of those signals grounded. Since ASUS Thor PSUs only have 12-pin cable and the company has confirmed earlier it ‘pipes up to 600W of power’, then this signal must have been internally grounded.
ASUS Thor PSU spec change, Source: ASUS
As it turns out, this is not the case. We have just noticed that ASUS made a small change to its ASUS Thor PSUs website. It no longer mentions 600W of power coming through a single 12-pin PCIe Gen5 cable, but only 450W. In other words, there are no data paths internally grounded and the cable is simply not offering the full power of the new standard. For that to work, one must use the 12+4-pin cable, which should be available with even newer PSUs called ASUS Loki.
The upcoming GeForce RTX 3090 Ti flagship NVIDIA card is rumored to have a TDP of 450W. This card is also expected to be the first to feature a 12+4-pin cable. With only 450W of power available, one must wonder if the Thor II PSU series will be enough for this card to work.
ASUS Thor is the high-end power supply to be available in 850W to 1600W power range. ASUS recently announced that the 1000W version will be available this month at 360 USD. The 1200W and 1600W PSUs should launch by the end of the first quarter, while 850W should be expected in Q2.
Source: ASUS
