If you're spending any time on what's left of Twitter these days, you know there's still nothing as entertaining as a good subtweet. On the social media platform, Sasa Marinkovic, AMD's senior director of gaming marketing, lobbed an intensely subtle insult at Nvidia over melting 16-pin connectors on the RTX 4090.
"Stay safe this holiday season," Marinkovic wrote, tagging the Radeon account and showing a photo of the dual 8-pin connectors on AMD's upcoming RX Radeon 7900 XTX and 7900 XT graphics cards.
This highlights that AMD has chosen to stick with the widely-used 8-pin standard, which it also made a big deal about while announcing the cards. On stage, Scott Herkelman, Radeon vice president and general manager, also teased Nvidia about the connectors and the fact that the RTX 4090 won't fit in most standard PC cases.
"There's no need to rebuild your PC, no need to upgrade your case and there's no need for a new power adapter," Herkelman said. (You can see it at the 22:06 mark in the embedded video below).
As of this writing, we've seen fewer than 30 samples of Nvidia's new adapter and connector melting, but it's caused serious concern in the enthusiast community. After all, people who buy $1,599 flagship graphics cards want them to be safe.
AMD has been taking a bit of an early victory lap; the RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX don't release until December 13. The more powerful XTX card will start at $999, while the XT will launch at $899. Many in the enthusiast community have celebrated that the cards are far cheaper than Nvidia's top-end cards (the RTX 4090's MSRP is $1,499, while the newly released RTX 4080 starts at $1,199), though it's not like AMD isn't also significantly raising prices generation-over-generation.
We've tested the RTX 4090 and RTX 4080, but with the new Radeons releasing in December, we haven't seen how they run. But AMD is talking a big game, and seems to be relishing it.