Intel ATX 3.0 power supply: Significant upgrade to prepare for 1800W graphics card

Intel ATX 3.0 power supply: Significant upgrade to prepare for 1800W graphics card

Intel ATX 3.0 power supply: Significant upgrade to prepare for 1800W graphics card.

Since the introduction of the ATX 2.X version of the power supply specification in 2003, the PC power supply has been running well for 19 years.

Until March this year, Intel launched the ATX 3.0 power supply specification.

The new 12VHPWR 16-pin interface can be used for PCIe 5.0 graphics cards and expansion cards. Provides a power supply capacity of up to 600W.

The changes this time are very big, and the future ATX 3.0 power supply and even the motherboard, CPU, and graphics card design will not be affected.

NVIDIA’s RTX 3090 Ti power supply is the first graphics card to support the new specification, but there is no actual ATX 3.0 power supply listed. So the graphics card also comes with three 8pin adapters.

This new specification was formulated by Intel and the PCI-SIG organization, so why should the two sides strengthen the graphics card power supply so much?

PCWorld interviewed Stephen Eastman of Intel Corporation, who wrote the power supply design guide and introduced the improvements in power supply design of ATX 3.0.

The original text is relatively long, and it can be summed up in one sentence – ATX 3.0 power supply is prepared for PCIe 5.0 graphics card.

On the surface, it seems to be increased to 600W power supply, but in fact it is higher, and it must be able to cope with 3 times the power consumption, that is, 1800W power supply, Although only momentarily.

The power consumption of the graphics card is not as simple as the TDP or TBP power consumption given by the manufacturer.

Although the current PCIe 5.0 graphics card nominally has a maximum power supply of 600W, the actual power consumption offset of the Power Excursion should be considered, which can be understood as the peak power consumption.

In the ATX 3.0 power supply, Intel and PCI-SIG have different power consumption offset requirements for different power supplies.

Among them, the power supply exceeding 450W needs to achieve 3x power supply for at least 100 microseconds.

For a 600W graphics card, the ATX 3.0 power supply is to achieve an instantaneous power output of 1800W, which is not possible with the current ATX power supply.

To put it another way, from the perspective of AMD and NVIDIA’s RX 7000 and RTX 40 series graphics cards, the direction of greatly increasing the power consumption of graphics cards to improve performance in the future is not running.  600W is not impossible.

If you want to change the card at the end of this year and early next year, everyone should consider a new generation of power supply.