I’ve known John Ternus for almost a dozen years, but not this John Ternus, the newly minted Apple CEO and sudden global tech celebrity. So, color me pleased when he and his Global Marketing SVP Greg Joswiak agreed to sit down with Tom’s Guide Global Editor-in-Chief Mark Spoonauer and me for a podcast discussion that ranged from bringing Pencil to the iPhone and excitement around the foldable iPhone Duo to what AI means for innovation, and the big moment when Ternus realized he was about to become CEO of arguably one of the biggest and most important tech companies in the world.

It’s kind of wild to watch someone who you think of as a brilliant but also normal and approachable guy transform into an industry rockstar almost overnight, and while Ternus, who is a 25-year Apple veteran and came directly from leading Apple’s hardware operations, doesn’t seem outwardly fazed by the transition, he’s also attuned to the moment.

“What an extraordinary privilege, right?” said Ternus with a wide grin. The reality is, I just love this place, right? It’s in my blood. …I love the people I work with. I love to be able to build the products that we all build together. And so, goosebumps…and excitement.”

SECURITY

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Privacy is surveillance

With the release of Apple Watch Series 12, Apple has decided that it’s ok to capture people’s conversations without their consent.

The latest Apple Watch comes with Audio Intelligence, a set of AI audio processing capabilities tuned for the company’s S11 chip. Its features include: Sound Recognition, Music Recognition with Shazam, Live Rewind, and Siri Recap. 

“Live Rewind lets you instantly see the last 15 seconds of a conversation as text,” Apple explains in its technical summary [PDF]. “Siri Recap summarizes conversations throughout your day and produces high-level Apple Intelligence-generated notes so you can stay present in the moment and catch up later.”

With the double-press of the Digital Crown – as Apple grandly refers to the button on its Watch – Live Rewind takes in an audio stream from the Watch microphone, processes it in a Secure Exclave on the S11 chip, and routes the data to the user’s nearby iPhone, which runs a speech-to-text algorithm on the 15-second audio segment. The resulting text is saved and the audio is discarded. 

The wearer’s Watch emits an audible tone, even in silent mode, to alert those in the vicinity and provides a visual cue for those able to see the face of the device. 

Nonetheless, bystanders alerted to the recording – to the extent they recognize the meaning of the tone – have not consented to being recorded, which is a legal requirement in 11 US states that have all-party consent laws.

Apple characterizes its implementation of brief eavesdropping as respectful of personal privacy. It makes that claim in a section titled, “How Live Rewind respects those around you,” citing the audible chime and visual on-screen animation.

Siri Recap, meanwhile, “summarizes conversations throughout your day and produces high-level Apple Intelligence-generated notes so you can stay present in the moment and catch up later.”

This too, Apple describes as an act of respect.

“By design, Siri Recap does not create a recording, does not produce a verbatim transcript, and does not identify and attribute speakers,” Apple’s technical documentation explains. “The output is a brief, high-level summary, comparable to notes a person might write after a conversation. There is no audible signal because no raw audio is retained, and there is no way to reconstruct the original audio from a Siri Recap or share raw audio with anyone.”

The implication here is that Apple’s non-consensual audio processing is less contemptuous of the public than the middle finger Meta has raised with its AI Glasses. That may be the case, but privacy advocates are still not impressed.

“Our right to conversational privacy must include freedom from other people, without our clear opt-in consent, using technology to document what we are saying,” said Electronic Frontier Foundation privacy litigation director Adam Schwartz in an email to The Register. “Otherwise, people will self-censor, and conversation will lose its spontaneity and intimacy.

“So, EFF is disappointed that Apple is releasing a new Audio Intelligence feature that reportedly can create a transcript or written summary of what people are saying in the vicinity of an Apple Watch. People don’t really have a practical means to consent or decline recording.

“We suggest people should think twice before using this technology, out of respect to the conversational privacy of others. While it remains to be seen how state eavesdropping laws will apply to this new technology, it is clear that always-on monitoring of our conversations is an unacceptable burden on our conversational privacy.” ®

AI inference company Baseten has acquired Blaxel, a startup that builds secure execution environments, or sandboxes, for AI agents. Baseten co-founder and chief technology officer Amir Haghighat told Axios Pro about the deal, which the outlet reported first on Thursday. Baseten later announced the acquisition.

Axios describes Blaxel as a San Francisco startup. The announcement did not disclose financial terms.

What Blaxel builds

Blaxel builds sandboxes based on microVMs, small isolated virtual machines. Each agent gets its own. According to the release, the sandboxes spin up and resume up to five times faster than competing products.

In a joint blog post, the companies said a Blaxel sandbox can suspend and resume in 25 milliseconds. It can also sit idle for months at close to zero cost.

Its other products include Agent Drive, a distributed filesystem that agents can share, and a networking layer that connects agents to tools, MCP servers, APIs and other agents. The team has been building the platform for more than 18 months, the post said.

What changes for customers

According to the post, Blaxel will continue to operate and its product does not change. Baseten will add new products based on Blaxel’s technology, starting with sandboxes.

In the near term, Blaxel’s technology expands Baseten’s support for code execution, tool use and session persistence, the release said. Over time, Baseten plans to integrate it with its inference, storage, observability and enterprise infrastructure.

“Agents need models, but they also need a secure environment to run in that’s fast, scalable, and reliable enough for production,” Haghighat said in the release.

Paul Sinaï, Blaxel’s co-founder and chief executive, said: “We started Blaxel because agents need environments designed to work alongside the models powering them.”

Baseten’s run of deals

Baseten, founded in 2019, has raised more than $2bn. In June, TNW reported that it raised $1.5bn at up to $13bn. The release puts the valuation of that Series F round at $13bn.

In December 2025, Baseten acquired Parsed, a reinforcement learning startup. Its customers include Abridge, Clay, Cursor, Lovable, Mercor and OpenEvidence, according to the company.

Wave Race 64: Recompiled is out as a native Windows and Apple Silicon build, and it treats Nintendo’s 1996 jet-ski racer with unusual care. You still supply a legal dump of Wave Race 64 USA Rev A, also called v1.1. The project never ships the ROM. Once that file is accepted by the launcher, the game’s own MIPS code runs as a compiled C program instead of through a full console emulator. Championship, Time Trial, and two-player races all boot, save records to emulated EEPROM, and play at speed.

They chose to use static recompilation with N64Recomp, N64ModernRuntime, RT64, and RecompFrontend. The game continues to run at the same rates that Nintendo originally chose: 30 updates per second when racing, 20 in menus, and Time Trial. RT64 then draws the frames between those updates to make the motion match the current display. Physics, camera timing, and race clocks remain unchanged. Version 0.4.0: finally, the sky and water are following the interpolated motion like they should be, rather than leaping about at the old cadence like everything else.

The first thing you will notice is the widescreen mode. The black overscan bars are gone, and the output is now exactly matched to your monitor’s resolution and aspect ratio. You also receive a Graphics option, which allows you to pick whether you want the racing HUD to be stretched across the entire frame or stuck in a 4:3 block in the center. Menus remain how they were originally designed, and two-player split screen now occupies the entire width. You may also adjust the field of view from 45 to 110 without stretching the 3D models. Draw distance is also increased, ensuring that far buoys and other objects are no longer cropped off by the original code. The accompanying HD texture collection has 1,828 mappings for helmet portraits, HUD typefaces, island surfaces, and ski panels, and the original textures are still available if you want to switch back and forth.

The water remains the feature that set this game apart in 1996, and the port hasn’t affected that. You can still choose the original rendering approach or the new default Aqua route, which looks much better with its lighter teal color, clearer shallows, and interpolated wave heights. In the settings, you can adjust the brightness, tint, and clarity using sliders. High mode adds screen-space reflections and finer spray. You can even modify the ripple strength and airborne spray. F9 and F10 exist so that you can compare Aqua and Classic, but don’t expect a rebuild of the courses as some beautiful new water simulator. It retains the same appearance as the previous surface that made Sunny Beach & Marine Fortress feel so alive on a 240-line screen.

Sound and control are treated equally. Audio still goes via all the RSP microcode being re-tweaked. The original soundtrack is accessible with a single menu click, and modified tracks have their own volume control. Now, those Controller haptic thingies collect data from the race. We’re talking about landings, crashes, buoys, power-ups, countdowns, lap times, and crossing the finish line. The events start at 80%, and you can then increase or decrease the level of continual feedback. Vibration on the trigger works if your hardware can handle it; however, it stops when the window loses focus or you enter the pause menu. It also works with keyboards with no issues, and controllers are remapped device by device.

The installation method is intentionally kept simple. On Windows, simply unzip and launch WaveRace64Recomp.exe. Mac users can just drop it to their Applications folder. You’ll find your settings and saves in the regular app-data local folder, and if something goes wrong, a log file will be ready for you. Just to clarify, because this is a USA Rev A only build, Japanese, European, v1.0 original, and Shindou layouts will not load. That’s because every modification in this build is linked to a certain revision. Certain modes, such as stunt and championship celebration, have had significantly less testing than the major racing circuits. Oh, and if you’re on a Mac, you may not receive the locked-in 120 Hz refresh rate, which is pretty much all of the testing we’ve done so far; those are the current constraints of this 0.4.0 beta, no hidden fine print.
[Source]

Apple has plenty of shiny numbers to sell the Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4 with. The new Health Sensing System, the Readiness feature, and more frequent HRV readings are just a couple of things that make these a meaningful upgrade. This is especially true for anyone who treats an Apple Watch primarily as a health and fitness device.

Though the feature that caught my eye has almost nothing to do with workouts. Apple calls it Audio Intelligence, and it essentially gives the Watch another way of understanding what is happening around you. The Series 12 and Ultra 4 can recognize important sounds, automatically identify music, recover the last few seconds of speech you failed to catch, and even create summaries of conversations you want to remember later.

Setting aside the obvious privacy concerns, this can be useful in many scenarios and is more than just another AI feature.

Live Rewind is the one I can’t wait to try

We’ve all had that moment where somebody says something, and your brain managed to process none of it. It could be due to the noisy environment around you, or perhaps someone mentioned an unfamiliar name. Maybe you’re listening while doing something else and suddenly realize you’ve missed the one important instruction buried in the conversation.

This is where Live Rewind comes in as your second set of ears. Double-press the Digital Crown and the Watch can show a text snippet covering the previous 15 seconds of speech. You can read what you missed, ask Siri about it, and even save the snippet in the Siri app if you actually need it later. Apple claims that activating Live Rewind doesn’t start some endless transcription session in the background. Rather, it retrieves only that previous 15-second window, and the text disappears unless you deliberately save it or ask Siri about it.

The feature doesn’t seem massive, but with the alternative being a recorder or taking notes, I can see it being handy. Apple has also built in a very deliberate social cue. Live Rewind plays an audible chime even when the Watch is on silent or connected to headphones. There’s also a full-screen animation, and a microphone indicator appears when you activate it. So anyone nearby gets an indication that you’ve asked the Watch to recover what was just said.

Audio Intelligence does much more than remember conversations

Siri Recap is naturally going to attract most of the attention because an Apple Watch ambiently taking notes about your conversations sounds futuristic and slightly alarming. But there’s a lot more to Audio Intelligence than just listening in on your conversation. Sound Recognition can detect things like alarms, sirens, doorbells, and a crying baby, then send an alert to the Watch even when the paired iPhone isn’t nearby. Apple primarily designed it as an accessibility feature for people who are deaf or hard of hearing, which is where its importance really lies.

You also have automatic Music Recognition with Shazam. Hear a song that caught your interest? You don’t need to open Shazam anymore, as you can simply have the new Apple Watches identify music playing around you automatically. The song and artist can then appear in the Music Recognition widget inside the Smart Stack without you tapping anything. It’s one of those tiny conveniences that just saves you a bit of time and effort, but I can already see how often it will get used.

Yes, Siri Recap is part of this too

We’ve already written at length about Siri Recap and why Apple’s privacy approach made us more comfortable with the idea of a smartwatch listening throughout parts of my day. But the short version is that Siri Recap can generate a title, summary, and key points from conversations rather than preserving a transcript. You can schedule when it operates based on time and location, manually toggle it from Control Center, edit or delete the resulting summaries, and unsaved Recaps automatically disappear after seven days.

Apple claims that Audio Intelligence doesn’t create or retain audio recordings. Raw audio is handled inside a hardware-isolated Secure Exclave on the S11 chip and is inaccessible to watchOS, apps, the user, or Apple. For Siri Recap, a condensed text representation eventually goes to Private Cloud Compute to create the summary.

This is an actual reason to buy the new hardware

Audio Intelligence can’t be simply installed on last year’s Watch. It requires the S11 chip and its Secure Exclave, limiting the complete feature set to the Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4. An Ultra 3 can run watchOS 27 and gets Siri AI, but it doesn’t suddenly gain the other new features like Live Rewind, Siri Recap, Sound Recognition through Audio Intelligence, or the new automatic Shazam functionality.

Live Rewind and Siri Recap arrive in beta later in 2026, starting in English, and won’t initially be available in the EU. Apple also says some server-assisted Audio Intelligence functionality is subject to daily usage limits. It is also worth noting that Live Rewind and Recap need a compatible Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhone alongside the new Watch. So I’m not declaring any of these features brilliant before I’ve actually used them.

The upgraded Apple Health experience can pull from hundreds of data points, but if you don’t have recent lab results to provide, a Quest panel can be ordered through the app without getting a doctor’s order.

Apple Health will soon get new features built around Apple Intelligence. Every data point that can be included will help provide a holistic view of your health, but not everyone has ease of access to medical labs.

If you’ve already got a medical provider and had labs done recently, they may already be in Apple Health through Health Records, or can be provided via PDF. For everyone else, Apple has partnered with Quest Diagnostics to provide a comprehensive set of labs, on demand.

The service can be found and ordered in the new Apple Health experience when it launches later in 2026. It will cost $119 for a panel that pulls over 50 biomarkers.

The labs will be performed at one of 2,000 locations found across the United States. It’s a much cheaper option than ordering the labs manually, especially if you don’t have active insurance.

Apple Health’s Lab Results tab was already quite comprehensive and included desired levels and explanations. The lab results Apple Health looks for will require blood work, urinalysis, and body measurements.

The information listed in the UI shown during the event suggests quite the range of biomarkers. They are:

• Blood Health
• Cardiac
• Cholesterol
• Glucose
• Kidney
• Liver
• Blood Pressure
• Body Metrics

Quest doesn’t have locations in every state, so some may need to travel to get the labs done. If the distance becomes too cost-prohibitive, look into getting labs done at a local clinic.

The $119 can also be paid using HSA or FSA funds, though that may or may not cover the included $6 physician service fee.

Once the Quest labs are done, they’ll automatically be populated in the Apple Health app. These results can be useful for understanding your overall health, and will be an excellent data point for Apple’s new AI-powered health app.

The Quest labs also include an optional doctor consultation to review results.

Apple’s recent announcement has been one of the most talked-about in recent years, with plenty to unpack in Apple’s newest iPhones. The iPhone 18 Pro gets variable aperture, more camera controls, and much more, while the iPhone Duo is easily the biggest change to the iPhone’s shape in years.

I can appreciate a faster processor or another camera feature, but neither matters much when I’m looking for a charger halfway through a busy day. Apple made a big jump with the iPhone 17 Pro generation last year, and the 18 Pro lineup thankfully keeps moving in the same direction.

The Pro Max gets the upgrade I wanted

Apple’s US battery claims show a fairly healthy improvement over the previous generation:

Apple rates the 18 Pro for three additional hours of both local and streamed video, and the Pro Max jumps by six hours of video playback and five hours of streaming. Aside from the new chipset, the biggest change that explains the difference is the batteries. On models with a physical SIM tray, MacRumors found the iPhone 18 Pro at 4,056mAh, just 1.7% larger than the 17 Pro’s 3,988mAh battery. The 18 Pro Max climbs to 5,391mAh, an 11.7% increase from 4,823mAh.

A20 Pro moves to a 2nm process, and Apple’s new C2 modem consumes 15% less energy than C1X, according to the company. So efficiency is doing plenty of the work. Charging also improves, with the 18 Pro models reaching 50% in around 15 minutes, down from 20 minutes on the 17 Pro generation.

The iPhone Duo surprised me even more

When the rumors of the foldable iPhone started seeming more concrete, my expectations for its battery life were conservative, to say the least. Foldables have more display to power and far less convenient internal space for a giant rectangular battery. Apple, like the brands before it, split the solution across two cells, putting one on either side and managing them as a single battery. It also made the Duo eSIM-only worldwide to free up additional internal space.

The results? Better than I expected:

Apple’s figures are especially interesting because the 31-hour inner-screen rating still exceeds Samsung’s 26-hour Fold 8 video-playback claim. If you stick to the smaller cover screen alone, the Duo stretches endurance all the way to 44 hours. Manufacturer test methods differ, so I wouldn’t treat those numbers as a laboratory head-to-head. They still give us a useful idea of what each company is targeting.

Another wide foldable rival that makes an interesting comparison is the Xiaomi 18 Fold, which is in a league of its own. Xiaomi managed to pack a massive 6,000mAh silicon-carbon battery. While there is no comparable official playback-hour figure that I could verify, but just the raw capacity alone gives it an edge.

Finally, an upgrade most users will notice

I’ll reserve judgment until we’ve properly tested all three new iPhones, because manufacturer battery claims never tell the entire story. But this is definitely a step in the right direction. Apple already made the iPhone 17 Pro one of the rare smaller flagships I could trust to comfortably get through a demanding day. In our tests, the 17 Pro could regularly finish the day with around 15% to 20% remaining, even with hours of Bluetooth music streaming.

Now the regular Pro goes farther, the Pro Max gets one of the biggest battery jumps in the lineup, and Apple’s first foldable doesn’t make compromises for users who choose the larger screen. Those are upgrades I will notice long after I’ve stopped playing with the new camera settings.

The six-year Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery has welcomed its first intake of 30 students this semester.

The University of Limerick (UL) has launched a “historic” new direct entry medicine programme, the first new direct entry undergraduate medicine programme developed in Ireland since 1854.

The six-year Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery programme has welcomed its first intake of 30 students this semester and aims to underscore the university’s role in advancing education and healthcare in the country.

The programme will include problem-based learning and the use of electronic cadavers, simulation technologies and advanced models to support anatomy and clinical skills, and will be structured in three stages across six years.

The first stage focuses on building a foundation in medicine; the second stage will involve students learning how to apply science to clinical practice with an exposure to patient care; the final stage prepares students for future practice, focusing on clinical placements and developing skills to improve patient and population health.

The course was launched by the Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science James Lawless, TD, who said, “Today’s launch is a landmark moment for medical education in Ireland. 

“As the first new direct entry undergraduate medicine programme established in this country since 1854, it reflects both the ambition of University of Limerick and our commitment to building the healthcare workforce Ireland needs for the future.

“For the students starting this journey, it is the beginning of an exciting and rewarding career path. This programme creates a new opportunity for talented young people to pursue medicine while helping to strengthen healthcare services for future generations.”

UL president Prof Shane Kilcommins added, “Innovation in education has been at the heart of University of Limerick since our earliest days, and this new direct entry medicine programme is a powerful expression of that tradition. The establishment of Ireland’s first new direct entry medical degree in well over a century and a half demonstrates UL’s capacity to lead, innovate and deliver in areas of strategic national importance.

“Together with our graduate entry medicine programme and our broad ecosystem of health sciences programmes, this initiative further cements UL’s position as a centre of excellence in health professional education.”

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from the incompetent-bipartisan-xenophobic-protectionism dept

If you enjoy badly written bipartisan protectionist tech legislation designed primarily to coddle giant U.S. companies under the xenophobia-tinged breathless pretense of privacy and national security, you are really going to enjoy the next twelve to twenty-four months.

While the U.S. drowns in corrupt kakistocracy, the Chinese are making significant market inroads in everything from AI to EVs. That’s resulted in U.S. companies applying greater and greater pressure on U.S. lawmakers to simply ban Chinese goods. The Trump administration’s adoption of this policy has been a hot and sloppy protectionist mess, incompetently implemented and unsubtly racist.

Automakers are particularly worried about cheaper, better Chinese EVs making their way to the U.S. So under the banner of the misleadingly named Alliance for Automotive Innovation, they’re pressuring U.S. lawmakers to enact a ban on Chinese EVs. You know, because they’re very worried about privacy and national security:

“Right now, Chinese automakers are dumping subsidized vehicles with connected software and hardware around the world,” John Bozzella, CEO of the group, said in the letter seen by CNBC. “This hasn’t happened inside the U.S. yet, but given the scale and urgency of this threat, we urge you to enact a Chinese vehicle, software and hardware ban before adjourning this year and make this policy the law of the land.”

“Enacting a permanent ban on Chinese vehicles and high-risk hardware and software in the 119th Congress will send a clear and bipartisan message that China’s strategy to dominate global automotive manufacturing will be met with a national security policy response from the American government,” Bozzella said.

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So for one, I like how the auto industry throws the word “subsidized” around as if they haven’t enjoyed generations’ worth of their own pointless subsidies. Two, the U.S. auto industry has some of the worst privacy standards and ratings of any industry in America, and sell the entirety of your driving, personal, and behavior data to any old random asshole in a country too corrupt to pass privacy laws.

Failing to secure your own vehicles and fighting tooth and nail against any privacy safeguards… then ranting incoherently about the threat of Chinese tech on U.S. shores is not serious policy. Our failure to regulate data brokers or pass modern privacy laws means the Chinese simply buy this same data from any of dozens of dodgy companies already, making a lot of this stuff lazy pantomime.

We’ve seen this before: Democratic lawmakers in Michigan recently tried to ban Chinese EVs from even visiting the state, suggesting that automakers are afraid of Americans even getting to look at overseas alternatives. The justification (by folks who are are, again, completely absent when it comes to any sort of domestic U.S. privacy standards) is they were just very concerned about U.S. consumer privacy.

I maintain that ideally you allow Chinese companies to compete in the U.S. market, but you fund, staff, and legally protect your labor, consumer, competition, and environmental regulators so that companies are all genuinely competing on a level playing field. You boot or penalize obvious bad actors on privacy, security, competition, and consumer protection, both foreign and domestic.

U.S. corporate giants don’t much want that, given it means more oversight, more competition, and diminished quarterly returns. So what we often get instead is a sort of a corrupt-fueled incompetent rank protectionism that’s highly performative but still broadly harmful.

And while you could theoretically implement protectionism in a way that’s coherent, the U.S. is too corrupt to do that. So what you get is stuff like the TikTok ban, which was driven by years of hysteria about Chinese spying and propaganda, only to result in a bipartisan array of lawmakers shoveling TikTok off to Trump’s billionaire autocrat friends, which was not any net improvement.

Or you get stuff like the “race to 5G,” which involved U.S. policymakers being told that the only way to keep pace with Chinese 5G was to give U.S. telecoms less oversight, more pointless subsidies, and approval for their terrible mergers (the U.S. lost the “race to 5G” in terms of reach, network quality, and affordability then immediately just… stopped talking about it).

Or you get stuff like the recent ban on Chinese drones, which the Trump FCC is too incompetent to implement, resulting in higher prices, lower quality products on U.S. shelves, new corrupt patronage systems, and a lot of pointless chaos.

As a backdrop we have a U.S. corporate press that’s incapable of expressing how badly any of this is going in practice (often because affluent media ownership supports the administration and its mindless deregulation), resulting in this strange disconnect between material reality and the performance lawmakers put on to convince themselves they’re doing serious and useful policy.

If U.S. policymakers cared about privacy and national security they’d pass a meaningful modern privacy law (with powerful penalties for U.S. companies or executives), and they’d regulate data brokers. If they cared about national security, they’d eject Donald Trump from the body politic. Unless they’re doing these things, they’re not really worth taking seriously on privacy or national security.

With cheaper Chinese AI models threatening U.S. tech giants’ dreams of software automation walled garden dominance, you can expect all of this sort of performative dysfunction to get much much dumber, supported by the press and the kind of folks who’ll talk your ear off over cocktails about how much they love free markets and the kind of innovation forged in the furnace of real competition.

Filed Under: ai, china, competition, EVs, national security, privacy, protectionism

Companies: aai

In a nutshell: The Nvidia RTX 5090 has long been plagued by catastrophic thermal failures that can cause its 16-pin power connector to melt under heavy workloads. In an effort to find a solution to the overheating issue, a team of tech YouTubers has reportedly created the world’s first RTX 5090 graphics card to use 8-pin power connectors instead of a 16-pin design.

Brazilian YouTube channel TecLab has demonstrated that an RTX 5090 can be connected to a PSU using standard 8-pin connectors instead of 16-pin ones, despite its 575W TDP. To perform the experiment, the modders used a Galax HOF OC LAB RTX 5090, which is designed to use two 16-pin connectors. However, the team claims that the card can even function with three 8-pin connectors.

As part of its effort to find an alternative to the 16-pin design, the team initially tested the card using XT90 power connectors, which support up to 90 amps each. They eventually opted for three 8-pin Mini-Fit Jr. connectors after making the necessary modifications, which involved tricking the sensors into accepting the new configuration.

The YouTubers put their plan into action by connecting the Sense 0 and Sense 1 pins, allowing the card to continue operating at its full TDP despite switching from a dual 16-pin to a triple 8-pin design. The modified card had nine +12V rails, each supporting around 8 – 8.5 amps. The team says the changes were limited to the hardware and did not require any firmware modifications.

To test the modified card, TecLab gradually increased the power threshold from 400W to 900W while closely monitoring the voltages and temperatures. The card operated at an impressive 3.4GHz while drawing around 70 amps on the 12V rails. The setup remained stable throughout the test, staying well within the recommended electrical and thermal safety margins.

The card was also tested with a peak current of 120A at 3.4GHz, and it still passed the test with flying colors, with operating temperatures reaching only around 35 degrees Celsius. The modders also tested the card with just two 8-pin connectors instead of three, and even that configuration was able to keep temperatures below 25 degrees Celsius, with the card drawing 66A while running at more than 3.2GHz.

Just days before releasing the latest video, TecLab demonstrated another solution to the RTX 5090’s overheating problem by routing the power wiring directly to the GPU’s PCB. The channel claimed that bypassing the 16-pin power connectors was a foolproof way to end “meltgate” for good, but acknowledged that it is not a practical solution for most gamers.