(Image credit: Asus)
Many owners of high-end NVIDIA graphics cards live in fear of the high-density 12+4-pin connector that supplies power to their video hardware, as the connector has been shown to have dubious reliability versus the previous-generation PCI Express peripheral power connectors, largely due to an extremely minimal safety margin. A user on Reddit has decided that existing measures to protect his card weren't sufficient, and has now vibe-coded himself up a free tool that shuts the whole PC down if per-pin power draw is too high for too long.The tool is ironically called "12VHPWR Guard" despite the fact that none of the graphics cards it supports actually have a 12VHPWR connector. The two cards primarily supported are the ASUS ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5080 and GeForce RTX 5090, both of which come with the updated 12V-2x6 connector. The modified plug is an attempt to mitigate the melting issue by slightly adjusting the dimensions, forcing users to make sure it is fully inserted into the card. However, the main power delivery wires and their contact points remain the same, and so the burning issue continues.The reason the developer says that the tool only supports these two cards is that the ROG Astral GPUs have dedicated per-pin current sensors, although, despite what the author says on Reddit, ASUS' ROG Matrix RTX 4090 and RTX 5090 also have these sensors, and the author lists at least the Matrix RTX 5090 as supported on GitHub. The author also notes that ASUS' GPU Tweak III software can throw a warning when power draw goes too high, but that the warning "does nothing" if he's in-game or AFK, despite the fact that the app does support an audible warning.
