An alleged prototype of Nvidia’s RTX 5090 has surfaced, featuring four 16-pin power connectors, courtesy Twitter/X user @yuuki_ans. Presumably this particular design is an early engineering sample which was used by Nvidia or one of its board partners for testing purposes. Although the unit pictured has been destroyed by cutting it in half, it does give us an insight in to what Nvidia was working with prior to the final design.
Having four power connectors could be for various reasons. A simple one could be just to provide a fail-safe. In the event of one of the connectors failing, which has been a common sight, then others could be used to continue delivering power to the GPU. Another possible use case could be to distribute power evenly in order to avoid overheating.
