Reddit user DallasGrave, who recently soldered a dual 8-pin board to an RTX 5090’s 16-pin header, is back with a more ambitious take on the same idea. The new “Quad 2×8 Header Conversion” mounts four 8-pin PCIe connectors right on the card, tapping the contact points of the 12V-2×6 header, so the 16-pin connector can either stay in use alongside it or be skipped entirely. Each 8-pin carries three 12 V conductors, which spreads the load over twelve wires instead of six.
According to the modder, current per conductor is “almost perfectly halved” compared to the native connector, landing at roughly 4.1 to 4.4 A per wire at 600 W, with wire temperatures dropping by around 20°C. The sense pins are set for 600 W, and the board has apparently been tested up to 800 W on a shunt-modded card, where the PCB itself reportedly sat at about 45°C. Videos covering installation, live current data, and a 24-hour sustained load test are apparently being shot now, and custom backplates are in the works to make the mod look more factory-made. Versions for nearly every card, Founders Edition included, are also going into production.
Modding efforts like this one continue to be made as reports of the 12V-2×6 connector melting pile up, whether on a reviewer’s RTX 5090 or during DLSS 5 testing. Modders have also gotten the RTX 5090 running purely on 8-pin connectors, while off-the-shelf safeguards haven’t fared much better. MSI’s yellow-tipped “safety-oriented” connector has shown burn marks, and ASUS’ $50 ROG Equalizer cable, sold specifically to prevent these burns, also reportedly burned. Even ASRock’s TempGuard failed to stop a meltdown on a $15,000 RTX PRO 6000 rig.