If you’re lucky enough to be able to buy a current graphics card at a reasonable price, you shouldn’t make the mistake of saving elsewhere. If you use the wrong cable, you risk an entire gaming system and, in the worst case, you can even cause a fire.
A wrong cable can ruin your gaming PC
Graphics cards are expensive and hard to come by. Even if the situation seems to be stabilizing very slowly, you still can’t just buy the model you want, you have to take what you can somehow get. If the budget is then exhausted, it can quickly happen that you try to save money in the wrong place. Powerful graphics cards need a lot of energy and a decent power supply. If there is no more money for it and the connections are missing, you often use a SATA to 8-pin cable, with which you can provide your new graphics card with the required energy via your old power supply unit. This is a big mistake, as a tech specialist points out on YouTube:
If you get the energy for your high-performance graphics card from such an adapter, you are asking too much of the cable. The SATA ports are designed for a maximum of 54 watts per port. A maximum of 108 watts comes from such a double cable, which becomes an 8-pin plug. But modern graphics cards require much more. And even the 54 watts per plug are far too much. There have been cases where hard drives that draw 9 watts melted a SATA connector.
What can happen? If you operate a high-performance graphics card on an old power supply unit via a SATA to 8-pin cable and the graphics card draws too much energy, it will at best only switch off or cannot develop its full performance. If you’re lucky, the cable will deform and melt. In the worst case, the cable starts to glow and your PC bursts into flames. It becomes particularly dangerous if the cables are not of good quality.
Things are happening in the PC gaming market:
Don’t skimp on the power supply
So even if you have bought a new graphics card and your budget is exhausted for the time being, you should save money and get a suitable power supply unit that has enough power and connections for the new hardware. So you risk neither the gaming PC nor your safety. It’s best to take a look at Amazon, the prices for good power supplies are not high (look at Amazon).