These new AMD Radeon cards just copied Nvidia in the worst way

AMD has to this point managed to keep away from the horrors of smoking energy sockets and melting plastic which have plagued Nvidia’s newest GPUs, however a brand new lineup of graphics playing cards with AMD GPUs at the moment are sporting the notorious 12VHPWR socket. ASRock’s new vary of Creator playing cards are based mostly on the newest AMD Radeon gaming GPUs and sport the 16-pin energy socket on the best hand edge.

Two playing cards have been launched, based mostly on the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT and 7900 XTX, neither of that are among the many finest graphics card choices we typically suggest proper now, however sit proper on the high of AMD’s present gaming GPU lineup. The playing cards even have a design characteristic we don’t usually see on gaming graphics playing cards nowadays, which is the old-school blower cooler.

This fashion of cooler includes a single, high-speed blower fan on one finish of the graphics card, and it’s fallen out of favor with avid gamers in the previous couple of years, because it makes a number of noise when the GPU is working exhausting. Nevertheless, whereas gaming playing cards now often characteristic two or three giant followers that may cool a GPU way more quietly at decrease speeds, there are nonetheless advantages of blower coolers in some industries.

That’s as a result of they’re compact, enabling you to put in a number of graphics playing cards subsequent to one another in a single motherboard. Certainly, these ASRock playing cards solely occupy two enlargement slots. You may not need to use them for gaming, however these playing cards may very well be superb for GPU compute techniques that need the facility of a number of GPUs to work on non-gaming purposes.

In the meantime, that 16-pin 12VHPWR socket sits on the best fringe of the cardboard, proper on the high. For the reason that Nvidia RTX 4090 was launched in 2022, there have been many stories of 12VHPWR sockets melting, rendering graphics playing cards and even energy provides unusable in some circumstances.

Till now, AMD has caught with old-school PCIe energy sockets on its Radeon graphics playing cards, with AMD’s senior director of client advertising, Saša Marinković, even utilizing it as a promoting level. In a publish on X (previously Twitter), he stated “Keep secure this vacation season. @amdradeon,” with a closeup of two eight-pin PCIe energy sockets on an AMD graphics card.

The brand new ASRock Creator playing cards had been noticed by Videocardz, and are already listed on Newegg, with a worth of $829.99 for the 7900 XT card, and $1,069.99 for the 7900 XTX card. Each playing cards run the GPUs at their normal reference specs, and are costlier than their normal gaming counterparts. Comparatively, an ASRock Phantom Gaming Radeon RX 7900 XT card at the moment goes for $699.99 on Newegg.

In the event you’re enthusiastic about how these GPUs carry out in video games, try our Radeon RX 7900 XT evaluate, in addition to our Radeon RX 7900 XTX evaluate, the place we run each of those graphics playing cards by means of a variety of gaming benchmarks.