The DapuStor J5101, an enterprise NVMe M.2 boot drive, built with the PCIe Gen 4 interface and a compact M.2 form factor, delivers fast, reliable server boot with low power consumption and flexible capacity options. These capabilities improve operational efficiency and lower total cost of ownership (TCO) in virtualization, AI, HPC, and cloud environments.

As AI infrastructure and data centers scale, server configurations are becoming denser and more complex, with higher costs per node. M.2 boot drives have become a critical component in server reliability and cluster operating costs, with evolving requirements in three key areas:

ASRock Rack is promising up to 4 TB of DDR5 on a single socket with its DMRD16-2L+, one of the first motherboards built for Intel's upcoming Xeon 7 "Diamond Rapids" processors. The board was shown at the OCP Global Summit 2026 and has since been detailed by ServeTheHome. It has 16 DIMM slots in a one-DIMM-per-channel layout, matching the 16-channel memory setup Intel detailed at HOT CHIPS. Regular RDIMMs top out at 128 GB per module and 8000 MT/s, while MRDIMMs run at up to 12,800 MT/s, with taller 2U MRDIMMs reaching 256 GB each. Populate all 16 slots with those, and you hit 4 TB, along with a theoretical bandwidth of roughly 1.6 TB/s.

Expansion is unusual, with no standard PCIe slots and no OCP NIC 3.0 connector. All I/O goes through up to 16 MCIO x8 connectors, each rated for PCIe 6.0 or CXL 3.0, for 128 lanes in total. The rest is fairly basic: one PCIe 5.0 x4 M.2 slot, two Intel I350 Gigabit Ethernet ports, an ASPEED AST2700 BMC with a dedicated management port, and VGA output. ASRock Rack fits it all on a 12 x 13-inch EEB PCB, about the size of a large E-ATX board, so it could squeeze into some bigger workstation cases. Pricing and availability have not been shared yet, but that is hardly surprising, since Intel has the Xeon 7 family slated for a 2027 debut on the new LGA9324 socket. The board is aimed at servers, though anyone planning a high-memory workstation for local AI will probably keep an eye on it.

Maxsun has shared full specifications for the SK-PTLNAS and SK-WCLAIO, two NAS-focused MoDT (Mobile on Desktop) motherboards built around Intel's Panther Lake and Wildcat Lake chips. Both were first shown at Computex 2026 and are expected to launch this month, though pricing is still unknown. The SK-PTLNAS now tops out at the Core Ultra 9 386H, a 16-core chip with four Xe3 GPU cores, a 25 W base power and up to 80 W of turbo power. The Computex listing mentioned options up to the Core Ultra X9 388H, which no longer seems to be on the table. It supports up to 128 GB of DDR5-7200 memory across two SO-DIMM slots, with five M.2 slots and three Mini SAS ports for storage. The board also gets a PCIe 5.0 x8 slot, 10GbE, 2.5GbE and two 1GbE ports, plus two Thunderbolt 4 ports. Maxsun lists Windows 11 and Ubuntu support.

The SK-WCLAIO measures just 90 x 165 mm, a big change from the mATX design shown in June. It runs the six-core Core 7 350 (2P + 4LPE) with two Xe3 cores, a single DDR5-6400 SO-DIMM slot for up to 48 GB, 1 TB of onboard UFS 3.1 storage and four M.2 slots. Wildcat Lake has very few PCIe lanes, so those drives probably won't each get full x4 bandwidth. Maxsun rates the system at 45 W when active and 16 W with drives on standby, which should suit an always-on home NAS. The power input is a bit unclear for now, since the listing mentions both a 12 V DC jack and USB-C PD.

X user GOK has shared photos of a huge red graphics card that carries four Polaris GPUs on a single PCB, jokingly asking whether it might be the biggest PCIe graphics card in the world. The four GPUs sit in a 2x2 layout, and each one appears to be surrounded by eight GDDR5 memory chips, which would mean 8 GB per GPU and a gigantic 32 GB across the board. According to GOK, a sticker on the card identifies it as a quad RX 470, which would work out to 8,192 stream processors in total. Feeding all of that are four 8-pin power connectors, while the only display output is a single HDMI port. A second photo shows the card lying next to a motherboard, and it's noticeably bigger than the board itself.

The PCB does carry an AMD logo next to a "DYII-XQ570 V1.0" marking, but it looks like AMD may not have built this one. GOK pointed out that the card has no board OPN (part number) and that the marking doesn't follow AMD's official format, adding that small factories in China sometimes put the AMD logo on their own designs. He also identified the PCIe switch as a PI7C9X2G, a PCIe 2.0 part, and thinks the card was likely made by one of those factories for crypto miners. He hasn't tested it yet, since he doesn't have a heatsink for it. Multi-GPU Polaris mining boards aren't new either, as Sapphire had a dual RX 570 mining card with 16 GB and a single HDMI port back in 2021.

BrainChip Holdings Ltd (ASX: BRN, OTCQX: BRCHF, ADR: BCHPY), a global leader in ultra-low-power, fully digital, event-based neuromorphic AI, today launched the AKD1500 Raspberry Pi 5 Development Kit. The kit pairs a Raspberry Pi 5 with BrainChip's AKD1500 M.2 board, giving the millions of engineers, makers and product teams who already build on Raspberry Pi an off-the-shelf way to develop low-power, always-on AI applications - and a clear path to production on the same AKD1500 chip.

Brian Beyer, CEO, Hellbender"As an American Tier 1 for physical AI, Hellbender looks for edge technologies that can move cleanly from prototype to production. BrainChip's AKD1500 Raspberry Pi 5 kit makes it easy for engineering teams to evaluate low-power, always-on AI on familiar hardware, and we see it as a promising option for the robotics and vision applications our customers are building."

Intel recently announced its D-series "Crescent Island" inference graphics cards, based on the Xe3P GPU microarchitecture, with the D270 being the highest-end SKU. The company's website has added a GPU bare die shot, revealing that the card is not the massive chip one might expect, but rather something seemingly smaller. The D270 GPU SKU features 32 Xe3P cores, 256 XMX engines, and 32 MB of unified L2 cache. The XMX engines have been redesigned from the four-deep systolic design of the regular Xe3 to 16-deep processing on the Xe3P. This card is intended for AI inferencing rather than training, so silicon requirements are secondary, and the card is rated for up to 480 GB of LPDDR5X.

Additional details include support for the FP4 data format alongside FP8, as well as large register files of 1 MB per core and an L1 cache of 512 KB per core. In total, there are 256 Vector engines and 256 of the new XMX engines, each divided into groups of eight per Xe3P core. Furthermore, the Xe3P lacks graphics processing elements for outputting imagery, as the silicon is designed purely for AI inference workloads that require long context and agentic tasks. A media engine with four encoders and four decoders is also included, which could assist with multimodal workloads where video generation and understanding are essential.

Intel Arc cards have always leaned heavily on Resizable BAR, to the point where Intel once told Alchemist buyers without it to stick with other vendors, and TechPowerUp's B580 review listed it as required for good performance. As spotted by Videocardz, developer Rod Burlamaqui has now released arc-rebar, a Linux tool that turns it on for Arc GPUs on motherboards that never got a ReBAR option. It runs from the initramfs at every boot, before the GPU driver loads, and doesn't touch the BIOS, kernel, or Intel's drivers. That sets it apart from earlier workarounds like ReBarUEFI, which has to be added to the motherboard's firmware.

The fix targets the PCIe switch built into Arc cards, whose small upstream BAR blocks Linux from enlarging the GPU's memory window. arc-rebar writes the card's ReBAR register, then removes and rescans the root port. Intel engineers have proposed a kernel-level fix for this, though it hasn't been merged yet. On a Supermicro X9DRH-7TF with dual Xeon E5-2670 v2 CPUs and a 2015 BIOS, a B580 went from 256 MiB of CPU-visible VRAM to a 16 GiB window covering all 12 GB. Measured VRAM bandwidth jumped from 15 GB/s to 392 GB/s, and a 4K Vulkan blur that used to stall ran at 39 to 50 FPS.

NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 30-series and RTX 40-series graphics cards are based on the same dies as their professional-grade GPUs. This means the compute potential of consumer-oriented RTX GPUs is restricted by NVIDIA's firmware stack, but modders have managed to unlock the instruction issuing rate equivalent to their professional GPU counterparts. Starting with the GeForce RTX 30-series "Ampere," a researcher developed an unlock that effectively doubles the instruction issuing speed of FP/BF16 FMA into FP32 operations on GA102, GA103, GA104, and GA106 cards. As a result, cards like the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti experience up to 80% faster matrix multiplication in BF16, which is crucial for running nearly all neural networks. The unlock supports GA102, GA103, GA104, and GA106-based GeForce RTX graphics cards.

Next, we have the GeForce RTX 40-series "Ada Lovelace" with another project that has demonstrated a massive 2× speedup in FP16 and BF16 tensor throughput with FP32 accumulation. When the GeForce RTX 4090 was tested with FP16 tensor throughput and matrix accumulation, the GPU achieved 165.6 TeraFLOPS, while the unlock pushed that number to 331.6 TeraFLOPS. This is intriguing as these computational performance numbers are typically reserved for the higher-end professional segment like the NVIDIA RTX 6000 "Ada Lovelace." It seems NVIDIA artificially limited the AD102 silicon's performance in compute-sensitive matrix multiplication and accumulation, affecting the performance of running large language models. For this unlock, AD102, AD103, and AD106 are officially unlocked.

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 2x8 Header Conversion" mounts four 8-pin PCIe connectors right on the card, tapping the contact points of the 12V-2x6 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.

PowerColor seems to be working on a low-profile version of the Radeon RX 9050, which would make it the first card of its kind. Leaker momomo_us spotted a listing for a PowerColor "RX9050 8GB LP," and while nothing else about the card has surfaced yet, the LP tag points to a half-height design meant for small form factor PCs and HTPCs. PowerColor hasn't announced it, and there's no word on specs, clocks, pricing, or availability. For reference, the RX 9050 launched in late July with 16 RDNA 4 compute units, 1,024 stream processors, a boost clock of up to 2.6 GHz, 8 GB of GDDR6 on a 128-bit bus, and a 92 W typical board power. The 4 GB variant is OEM-only, so the 8 GB model is the one most people can actually buy.

That 92 W figure is the interesting part, since it sits just above the 75 W a PCIe slot can deliver. PowerColor's existing Reaper RX 9050 is a 200 mm, dual-slot card with a single 8-pin connector, so the LP model has to make a choice: either keep external power or ship with trimmed power limits and clocks. It's unclear which route PowerColor will take. Low-profile RDNA 4 cards have been rare so far, with Vastarmor's LP RX 9060 XT showing up at CES as one of the few examples. The RX 9050 launched at $279 in Asia-Pacific, Japan, and Latin America only, so the LP model may well follow a similar regional rollout.

Intel's upcoming "Nova Lake" desktop platform is drawing nearer, and today we have some intriguing details thanks to the Chinese electronics and motherboard maker Decenta. In leaked information about the motherboard SKU "M26-NVLS-ATX09," we see that it uses Intel's new LGA1954 socket and is listed with Q970 and B960 chipset options. The most notable difference between the two chipsets seems to be their expansion capabilities. Previously leaked specifications suggest that the Q970 provides a total of 44 PCIe lanes, including eight PCIe 5.0 lanes supplied by the chipset. In contrast, the B960 reportedly offers 34 lanes, with no additional PCIe 5.0 lanes from the chipset itself.

Both chipsets feature PCIe 4.0 connectivity, although the Q970 offers 12 chipset lanes compared to the B960's 14. Decenta's ATX motherboard supports four DDR5-6400 memory modules, with dual-channel operation and a maximum capacity of 256 GB. Its expansion layout includes PCIe 5.0 slots, two M.2 storage connectors, and a legacy PCI slot for older industrial hardware. For wireless connectivity, we see that Decanta's platform supports expansion through an M.2 E-Key socket that supports Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6.x modules. VGA, HDMI, and DisplayPort outputs allow up to three displays to operate simultaneously.

KIOXIA America, Inc. today announced the addition of direct liquid cooling (DLC) models to its KIOXIA CM9 Series enterprise SSD lineup to support cold-plate-enabled server designs. The new E3.S DLC models also support traditional air-cooled environments.

As AI and other high-performance enterprise environments continue to advance, direct liquid cooling is becoming increasingly important to address growing computing power demands and associated cooling requirements. In order to fulfill the growing compute demands, increased power requirements are driving the need for innovative heat dissipation solutions. DLC infrastructure can offer significant energy savings compared with conventional air cooling, while enabling more servers to be cooled per rack.

Astera Labs, Inc. (Nasdaq: ALAB), a leader in semiconductor-based connectivity solutions for rack-scale AI infrastructure, today announced Orion: a modular rack-scale reference design with production-grade connectivity that allows customers to choose their own GPU and CPU. To be offered through Astera Labs' ODM and OEM partners, the Orion production-grade reference designs are expected to help enable neocloud and enterprise customers to deploy AI infrastructure faster and run it more efficiently, turning racks built on open standards into token-efficient AI factories.

For neoclouds and enterprises to economically serve inference at scale, they must secure sufficient accelerator and CPU capacity while delivering predictable, low-latency performance across increasingly complex AI infrastructure. But because they must commit to that capacity long before they know which accelerator will be available or affordable for their workloads, tying early investment to a single platform carries unnecessary cost and risk. At the same time, ODMs and OEMs are forced to repeatedly solve complex integration, validation, and software challenges for every new accelerator platform—slowing deployments when inference capacity is in critical demand.

The ICY DOCK EXLink MB308A5 is a PCIe 5.0 x16 NVMe host adapter card with dual MCIO 8i (SFF-TA-1016) connectivity, designed for next-generation high-speed NVMe cabling. With an integrated PCIe Gen 5 redriver and 100 MHz clock buffering, it helps maintain signal integrity for 32 GT/s links across longer trace and cable routing commonly found in servers, workstations, and validation platforms.

PCIe 5.0 x16 Lane Bifurcation for Multi-Drive NVMe Topologies
With a PCIe 5.0 x16 interface delivering up to 512 Gbps of total bandwidth, the MB308A5 is designed for platforms that support PCIe lane bifurcation (x4 / x4 / x4 / x4). When enabled, the PCIe x16 interface can be allocated into four independent NVMe x4 links, allowing up to four NVMe SSDs to be addressed through MCIO cabling.

Melting 16-pin connectors keep making headlines, and some RTX 5090 owners have started taking the protection of their expensive cards into their own hands. Reddit user DallasGrave has modified an MSI GeForce RTX 5090 with two extra 8-pin PCIe power inputs that work alongside the card's original 16-pin connector. According to their post on r/pcmasterrace, a small pickup PCB is soldered to the contacts of the 16-pin header, and that board feeds a second PCB carrying the two 8-pin sockets. The card then runs on three cables in total. DallasGrave says each conductor now carries roughly 3 A, and that the wires never crossed 40°C during a 48-hour run at 550 W, even at the joint. More test data is apparently on the way, so for now these are the modder's own numbers.

The 12V-2x6 revision was supposed to fix the melting power connector issues. In early 2025, NVIDIA said the 16-pin melting issues were over, pointing to the updated connector on the RTX 50-series. However, the first melted RTX 5090 Founders Edition was reported shortly after, in that case with a third-party cable. Since then, several RTX 5090 power connectors have reportedly melted, including one with an undervolt and a -100 W power limit. Moreover, last month Hardware Unboxed watched its RTX 5090 power cable reach 175°C with a single wire pulling around 22 A.

Intel has added its highly anticipated "Crescent Island" Xe3P GPU IP as a supported platform to its Media Driver in the 2026Q3 release. This confirms that the company is working on bringing another GPU generation to the masses soon. With the Intel Media Driver 2026Q3, we learn that the GPU will support video acceleration as well. This means that video editing, video decoding and encoding, and processing will all be available on "Crescent Island," which we initially believed to be a GPU dedicated solely to AI inferencing. However, Intel will also power media processing workloads for workstations, and we expect to see similar features in video standards, like AV1 decode, as seen in "Panther Lake" and the upcoming "Nova Lake" with their respective integrated graphics.

If readers recall, Intel unveiled more details at Hot Chips 2026. Based on the Xe3P GPU IP, the graphics card is designed as a 350 W, air-cooled, PCIe format compatible with any configuration. The GPU itself features 32 Xe3P cores, 256 XMX engines, 32 MB of unified L2 cache, and 160 GB of LPDDR5X memory. This memory configuration is exclusive to Intel-branded "Crescent Island" graphics cards, while the company allows its ODMs to equip the card with up to 480 GB of LPDDR5X memory for maximum VRAM capacity.

Infineon Technologies AG (FSE: IFX / OTCQX: IFNNY), a global leader in USB semiconductor solutions, today announced a new PCI Express Gen 4 x4 add-on card reference design that addresses key barriers to USB 20 Gbps (USB 3.2 Gen 2×2) adoption. Debuting at VISION Stuttgart 2026, the industry-first standalone reference design integrates ASMedia's ASM4242 USB4 host controller with Infineon's EZ-PD CCG7 USB Power Delivery (PD) controller to support robust, high-performance connectivity for machine vision systems.

A primary focus of this release is Infineon's continued effort to expand and mature the USB 20 Gbps ecosystem. While the standard offers double the bandwidth of previous generations, widespread industrial adoption has been limited by signal integrity challenges over longer distances and complex power requirements. This new reference design directly addresses these hurdles by enabling reliable data transmission over 5-meter passive USB cables, which is important for industrial environments where cameras are often mounted far from the host PC. By demonstrating USB 20 Gbps operation over passive cabling at this length, Infineon helps reduce an integration challenge for system designers.

Intel's Core Ultra 400-series "Nova Lake" CPUs are reportedly nearing launch as Intel has successfully passed USB and PCIe compliance testing. This means the platform has officially passed testing with the two organizations, and all the advertised specifications are working correctly. Starting with the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), a governing body of the USB standard, there are two "Nova Lake-H" device IDs certified for compliance with USB4. These include devices with IDs D331 and D333. Additionally, USB-IF lists ID 6E6E for the "Nova Lake" PCH-S chipset for desktop motherboards, compliant with USB 3.2 Gen 2. Intel likely chose a desktop chipset and a laptop CPU to achieve Qualification by Similarity, where testing one product can earn certification for other products easily. To avoid revealing too much before the launch, Intel opted for this strategy instead of testing a full flagship desktop CPU.

For the PCI-SIG, a governing body for PCIe compliance, Intel's 900-series chipset has long been present with the IDs 6E38-6E3F, 6E30-6E35, and 6E40-6E47. These were added back in April, but in August, another set of entries for CPUs specifically appeared. Certifying the PCIe 5.0 x16 root complex were device IDs D461, D465, and D467-D46A, which are likely "Nova Lake-S" CPUs or some mobile variation. Regardless, the verification process is the final stage that a platform and the CPU usually go through before the launch is finalized.

After showing off its Gorgon Halo mini workstations at IFA 2026, Acemagic has officially launched the F9A mini PC as an AI workstation powered by the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ APU with its Radeon 8065S iGPU, for 131 TOPS of AI compute and up to 192 GB of unified memory. The Ryzen AI mini PC's all-metal chassis measures in at just 158.5 x 158.5 x 81.5 mm, or 2 L volume, and pricing starts at $6,499 for 192 GB of memory and a 2 TB SSD.

The mini PC features a modern ports selection, with front I/O consisting of dual USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports, a USB4 Type-C port, an SD card reader, and a 3.5 mm audio combo jack. The back of the mini PC, meanwhile, features another USB4 port, DisplayPort 2.1, HDMI 2.1, dual 2.5 GbE, a USB 2.0 port, another USB 3.2 Gen 2 port, and an OCuLink port for eGPU expansion in the event that you need more power than the Radeon 8065S can put out. The 192 GB of LPDDR5X-8355 unified memory can be configured so that 160 GB is dedicated to video memory.

Honor, the smartphone and computer company formerly owned by Huawei, has officially revealed the Tiangong AXB35, a new AI workstation platform that designed for enterprise use and made to run on a choice of AMD, Intel, or NVIDIA hardware in a tiny SFF desktop chassis measuring just 70 × 192 × 203 mm, or around 2 L volume. Honor says that the Tiangong SFF PC is designed for everything from high-level office work and local knowledge bases, AI inference workloads, and agentic applications, but it would also be useful as a raw computational workstation for everything from 3D modelling and creative tasks to developing, and even gaming.

The Tiangong AXB35 comes in three variants: Standard, Pro, and Ultra, The Standard AXB35 comes equipped with Intel's Core Ultra X7 358H CPU, which features the new Intel Arc B390 iGPU, a total of 16 cores (4× P-Cores, 12× E-Cores, 4× LP E-Cores), and support for up to 96 GB of memory. The Pro version comes with AMD's 16-core Ryzen AI Max+ 395, packing the Radeon 8060S iGPU and up to 128 GB of LPDDR5X memory on a wide 256 GB/s bus. Meanwhile, the Ultra version comes with NVIDIA's new RTX Spark platform, based on the Arm architecture.

Modders at the Brazilian YouTube channel TecLab have an RTX 5090 running on three standard 8-pin PCIe connectors instead of the 16-pin design that keeps melting on high-end NVIDIA cards. The team stripped a Galax GeForce RTX 5090D HOF OC LAB XOC down to the bare PCB, removed both native 16-pin inputs, and soldered three 8-pin connectors straight to the power regulators. Sense pins were rewired so the card would still request full power, with liquid cooling keeping temperatures in check.

During a livestream, the modders ramped the card from 400 W to 900 W across the three cables, pulling over 120 A while holding a 3,400 MHz clock. Two connectors still delivered 66 A at 3,200 MHz, and even a single 8-pin managed 65 A at 3,100 MHz. The mod stayed entirely at the hardware level, with no BIOS or software tweaks involved. Throughout the test, the modified RTX 5090 stayed within its power and thermal limits, and passed all tests with flying colors.

We recently covered a low-profile GeForce RTX 3060 that was spotted in a Bilibili video from China. Now, a very similar single-slot GeForce RTX 3060 with no external power connector is available to buy at a major retailer. The SRhonyra RTX 3060 Low Profile showed up on Newegg for $495.59, and it's built to run entirely off the PCIe x16 slot's own power budget. It keeps the full 12 GB of GDDR6 and the GA106 die, but drops the 6-pin and 8-pin connectors a standard RTX 3060 needs to hit its 170 W TDP. Newegg lists a 70 W TDP for this card, which is just under the 75 W that the PCIe slot can provide by itself.

It features a single-slot blower cooler, and just one HDMI 2.1 and one DisplayPort 1.4a output on the card. Similar to the Bilibili card, this one also required shunt-modding the power-sensing circuit, since the 70 W TDP is below the 100 W floor the RTX 3060 can normally reach through undervolting alone. Although we don't have any performance figures for this particular card, we do have a reference point. Testing on a similar card showed the clocks struggling to reach 900 MHz against a rated 1,777 MHz boost, with 3DMark Time Spy scores around half of a normal RTX 3060 and even behind a GTX 1060.

Someone in China has taken the GeForce RTX 3060 and stripped it down to run entirely off the PCIe slot, with no 6-pin or 8-pin connector in sight. A Bilibili creator going by WestmereX shared the card, first spotted by UNIKO's Hardware, showing a single-slot, low-profile design about the size of a smartphone, with just one HDMI and one DisplayPort output. The card uses a blower-style cooler with a single fan that's pushing hot air out the back. The shroud itself is a thin metal sheet handling all the heat dissipation, with no fin stack, no backplate, and only a basic heatsink in the middle.

The PCIe slot tops out at 75 W, well under the RTX 3060's stock 170 W TDP, so apparently getting there required a shunt mod to fool the card's power-sensing circuit into accepting the lower limit. The results aren't pretty at all. Clock speeds barely creep past 900 MHz despite a rated 1,777 MHz boost, and the card posted just 4,821 points in 3DMark Time Spy. That's well behind the roughly 9,000 a standard RTX 3060 manages, and even below older cards like the GTX 1060 and RX 580.

DLSS 5 seems to be contributing to increased power draw, and we have our first victim here. Videocardz reports a new melted-connector case on an MSI GeForce RTX 5090 Gaming Trio OC, which surfaced during DLSS 5 Neural Rendering testing in NBA 2K27, currently the only officially supported game. A reader nicknamed erek documented the incident, noting DLSS 5 pushed the card's power draw from around 450 W to over 600 W, which is above MSI's 575 W rating. A GPU-Z screenshot showed a peak board power reading of 613.5 W, which erek says held steady rather than spiking briefly.

Erek reported the card stopped working shortly after, and a burning smell led him to find that the connector's plastic had melted and fused to the socket. We already reported last week that DLSS 5 can push the RTX 5090's power draw unusually high, so this seems to be the first reported case where that added power draw has burned the notorious RTX 5090 power connectors. However, it should be remembered that GPU-Z tracks total board power rather than just the auxiliary connectors, since the PCIe slot also supplies power, so the reading doesn't necessarily mean the connector carried the full load.

The TechPowerUp team visited the Chieftec booth at IFA 2026, with some interesting offerings on display. Chieftec brought its case lineup to the show, mixing an unannounced E-ATX tower with two chassis it already launched earlier this year. The new one is the Atlas, an E-ATX case supporting up to 420 mm radiators in the front or top. It has room for three 120 mm fans behind the power supply shroud, one rear fan, and an extra 120 mm unit near the PCIe brackets meant to pull hot air away from the graphics card. There are eight expansion slots and up to 420 mm of GPU clearance. This case is really meant for workstation or server builds, and its clean, functional design makes it ideal for that purpose.