Super Flower has launched a small add-on that sits between a graphics card and its power cable and sounds an alarm when one of the connector's pins carries too much current.
The VGA 12+4 pin OCP Dongle (OCP is overcurrent protection, meaning current beyond what a cable or connector is rated for) measures the current on the pins of the 12V-2x6 connector, also known as 12VHPWR. That connector can deliver up to 600 watts, enough for an RTX 5090. It has six +12V pins, so an even split puts roughly 8.33 A on each.
The split is rarely even. Resistance and manufacturing imperfections push more current onto some pins and less onto others, and the pins that take the extra load are where the melting starts.
The dongle sets two thresholds. If any pin goes above 9.5 A, it lights orange and buzzes intermittently. Above 12 A, it lights red and buzzes continuously. If that persists for 195 seconds, a feature called VGA Black Screen Protection kicks in. Super Flower describes it only as a way to buy time to check connections.
The idea is not new. Cooler Master sells a GPU Shield Adapter Cable that works on much the same principle, and some power supplies, including those with MSI's GPU Safeguard+, build in similar monitoring. Uniko's Hardware, which spotted the dongle, reported that it is currently available only in Taiwan, as part of a power supply bundle.
The 9.5 A trigger sits about 14 percent above the even-split figure, and the red alert at 12 A is roughly 44 percent above it. That is a fairly tight band. Still, a dongle can only report a problem, not fix an unbalanced connector. The more telling detail is that several companies now sell warning systems for a standard power plug on a card that can cost well over $1,000.