Hello gamers, this bad boy arrived today and it's the first time I've encountered 3 PCIe power slots. I'm familiar with using 1 cable and using the daisy chained 8 pin to handle the 2 slots. Since my Gigabyte 80+ G 1000W came with 3 of these PCIe cables I'm assuming this setup is correct? I'm probably needlessly worrying that I'll brick this.
To be exact, each cable is an 2+6 pin into the PSU while the opposite end is 2 (daisy chained) 2+6 pins. My worry is rooted in not being familiar with the daisy chained bits importance.
Is this really such a big of a concern? I just built a new system recently with 7900 XTX and Corsair RM850x as a PSU, and it came with only 2 PCIe cables with daisy-chain ends (ridiculous amount of SATAs though for some reason), so one of the connectors on the GPU is currently using that. Should I shell out for an extra cable? Corsair ones are ridiculously overpriced where I'm at, €23 for a single one.
If the card pulls more than 300w I personally wouldn’t be using a daisy chain.
You will probably still be fine on a card with three plugs across two cables.
It’s worse on cards with two plugs, like some of the 3090 and 3080 cards. That use 400+ w of power.
I shelled out just to be sure (bought cables with two ends though, since they're for some reason cheaper than single connector ones — makes cable management a bit messier). I haven't seen it to pull more than 200w so far though, although the only game I've been testing it with was Elden Ring which is admittedly not the most demanding one (even in 4k with everything maxed).
The game I have found that pushes power use the hardest for testing real world cooling and power on video cards, is Metro exodus enhanced. (Awesome game also which is worth the bug anyway)
It consistently uses nearly 80-100w more than anything else I have seen.
Pushed my modded and watercooled 3090 to 600w at which point the power limit I set there held it. Even at 600w it’s power limiting down nearly 80mhz below normal full load clocks.