EZDIY-FAB's Alpha TS13 is a U-shaped 12V-2x6 adapter with a built-in TFT screen that reports GPU power draw and connector temperature with no software involved, with an 85°C alarm. We put 600 W through it, then pointed a heat gun at it to see whether the alarm actually does its job.

EZDIY-FAB was founded in 2016 and has built its business on manufacturing cables and adapters, mostly for GPUs: PCIe riser cables, GPU support brackets, cable combs and adapters, but there are also ARGB fans. Today's product is a bit more ambitious than a cable though. The EZDIY-FAB Alpha TS13 is a 12V-2x6 pass-through adapter with a small TFT screen built into it, and it reports how much power your graphics card is drawing and how hot the power connector is getting—without installing a single piece of software.

Why a product like this exists doesn't need a long explanation. You've all heard the stories. Ever since NVIDIA introduced the 16-pin connector, there have been reports about melted connectors that have kept the topic alive. The issue is quite well understood by now: the six 12 V lines are wired in parallel, with no per-pin current balancing on the card side, so if one terminal makes poor contact, the current it was supposed to carry gets redistributed to its neighbors. Running more current through a wire means that it will heat up, and contact resistance rises even further, in some cases leading to a runaway scenario.

What makes this so frustrating is that the card itself has no idea when this is happening—there is no sensor at the connector. That's the gap the Alpha TS13 is aiming at (like several other devices on the market). It sits between your PSU cable and the graphics card, plugged into the graphics card directly and measures current and temperature right at its own connectors, and displays the numbers on a screen for easy inspection. There's also a temperature alert: at 85°C, a buzzer goes off. The Alpha TS13 retails for $60 in black or white. There are two versions—white and black, and each of those has two variants—16-pin connector oriented normally, or flipped, for compatibility with ASUS graphics cards, for example.