Nvidia’s ungainly prototype 6-legged power adapter shown in new video — fabled RTX Titan Ada was allegedly supposed to come with dual 12VHPWR connectors that needed 6x 8-pin PCIe plugs

A few months ago, popular enthusiast der8auer took a look at the RTX Titan Ada, an unreleased card from Nvidia’s Ada Lovelace lineup that was supposed to take full advantage of the AD102 GPU, purportedly featuring 18,432 cores and 48 GB VRAM. While this card never made it to market, a working prototype of it featuring dual 12VHPWR connectors does exist. And, today, we get to see the insane adapter that ships with it to make the whole thing compatible with older power supplies (that don’t adhere to the ATX 3.0/3.1 spec).

Nvidia’s Secret Dual 12VHPWR Adapter – YouTube Watch On

The Titan series from Nvidia always represented the best-in-class mainstream GPU the company had to offer. Since 2018’s RTX Titan, Nvidia has replaced this with its 90-class GPUs like the RTX 3090 and 5090. The RTX Titan Ada was, therefore, supposed to be the flagship offering of the Ada Lovelace lineup, superceding even the RTX 4090. It was the largest reference card Nvidia had ever built, but alas, we never got to enjoy the brutality of it.

All that performance requires a lot of power, and this card came well-equipped. With not only one but two 12VHPWR connectors, the Titan Ada can technically handle up to 1200W of power, but due to driver and BIOS limitations, it only peaked at around 600W (with overclocking) when der8bauer tested it earlier. Now, in his latest video, he specifically breaks down this power delivery system and, most interestingly, the mystery dual 12VHPWR to 6x 8-pin adapter.

You may like

• Nvidia RTX 5090 prototype surfaces with four 16-pin power connectors and additional VRMs

• Asus RTX 5090 BTF 2.5 GPU successfully pulls over 1,900W in extreme test

• $5,500 RTX 5090D with dual 16-pin power connectors and 2000W TDP escapes to eBay

As the name suggests, Nvidia made an adapter that can take the power from six standard 8-pin PCIe connectors, so 900W, and supply that across two 12VHPWR connectors. This adapter has no load balancing, and there are no sense pins on the connector either, so the GPU will run regardless of how many 8-pins are actually plugged in. Der8auer demonstrates this by literally unplugging the 8-pin connectors one by one while the card is running, and it doesn’t shut down even when down to just two 8-pins.