AMD has so far managed to avoid the horrors of smoking power sockets and melting plastic that have plagued Nvidia's latest GPUs, but a new lineup of graphics cards with AMD GPUs are now sporting the infamous 12VHPWR socket. ASRock's new range of Creator cards are based on the latest AMD Radeon gaming GPUs and sport the 16-pin power socket on the right hand edge.
Two cards have been released, based on the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT and 7900 XTX, neither of which are among the best graphics card options we generally recommend right now, but sit right at the top of AMD's current gaming GPU lineup. The cards also have a design feature we don't often see on gaming graphics cards these days, which is the old-school blower cooler.
This style of cooler features a single, high-speed blower fan on one end of the graphics card, and it's fallen out of favor with gamers in the last few years, as it makes a lot of noise when the GPU is working hard. However, while gaming cards now usually feature two or three large fans that can cool a GPU much more quietly at lower speeds, there are still benefits of blower coolers in some industries.
That's because they're compact, enabling you to install several graphics cards next to each other in one motherboard. Indeed, these ASRock cards only occupy two expansion slots. You might not want to use them for gaming, but these cards could be ideal for GPU compute systems that want the power of several GPUs to work on non-gaming applications.
Meanwhile, that 16-pin 12VHPWR socket sits on the right edge of the card, right at the top. Since the Nvidia RTX 4090 was released in 2022, there have been many reports of 12VHPWR sockets melting, rendering graphics cards and even power supplies unusable in some circumstances.
Until now, AMD has stuck with old-school PCIe power sockets on its Radeon graphics cards, with AMD's senior director of consumer marketing, Saša Marinković, even using it as a selling point. In a post on X (formerly Twitter), he said "Stay safe this holiday season. @amdradeon," with a closeup of two eight-pin PCIe power sockets on an AMD graphics card.
The new ASRock Creator cards were spotted by Videocardz, and are already listed on Newegg, with a price of $829.99 for the 7900 XT card, and $1,069.99 for the 7900 XTX card. Both cards run the GPUs at their standard reference specs, and are more expensive than their standard gaming counterparts. Comparatively, an ASRock Phantom Gaming Radeon RX 7900 XT card currently goes for $699.99 on Newegg.
If you're interested in how these GPUs perform in games, check out our Radeon RX 7900 XT review, as well as our Radeon RX 7900 XTX review, where we run both of these graphics cards through a range of gaming benchmarks.