Imagine you are building a PC. It is a budget build, so using some older or second-hand components to keep costs down, but power supply units are relatively cheap, so you bought a new one. It only comes with a 16-pin GPU cable, not the dual 8-pin that you need for the graphics card. Thankfully, MSI’s new promotion is aiming to avoid this kind of misery. It also helps out with some of AMD’s latest GPUs.

According to MSI, customers who purchase the MPG A1250GS PCIe5 or the MPG A1000GS PCIe5 will be eligible for the offer. This will allow customers to claim an adapter cable that allows for a 16-pin power cable to be converted into a dual 8-pin connector.

This means that users who have an older GPU that utilises the older 2×8 standard will be able to order a new MSI power supply without worrying if the shiny new power supply will play nicely with the older hardware. We say old, but AMD hasn’t made the same switch to the 12VHPWR (now 12V-2×6) standard as Nvidia, so its newest cards still benefit from this promotion.

Fully equipped?

The promotion has been billed as ‘Fully Equipped for Your Build’. MSI power supplies only include one 8-pin PCIe cable with this type of power supply. The included cable is not even a standard 8-pin cable, and is actually a 6+2-pin cable, which is inadequate for the dual 8-pin power needs of many GPUS, including the current AMD Radeon 9000 series.

This does raise the question of why customers are required to redeem a voucher and wait for the adapter to be delivered, instead of the required cables simply being included in the box. Some analysts believe that MSI is trying to save a few cents by forcing customers with older hardware to request the cables. Especially since it appears that the free cable adapters are not covered by the same warranty as the power supply.