The PC industry uses a large variety of power connectors which were originally introduced by Molex, using their trademarked (and search-engine unfriendly) brand name "Molex Mini-Fit Jr". This started with the venerable ATX power supply connector shown below:
And continued with a wide variety of other power connectors, notably the 6-pin and 8-pin PCIe auxiliary power connectors used by GPUs (pictures below).
Question:
What is the non-trademarked generic name for this family of connectors?
These connectors are manufactured by several other companies (AMP, TE, FCI, Amphenol, etc) so it's not a Molex-proprietary technology, and I don't think it would have become so widespread if it were anyways. But the other manufacturers list their products under nothing more than a long sequence of digits, like TE's "1586041-6".
I would like to be able to search for connectors in this family without limiting myself to Molex products, which are the only ones that can use the trademarked term "Mini-Fit Jr". There must be a generic term; I'm not a lawyer and don't want to devolve this into amateur legal debates, but my understanding is that in order to maintain a trademark ("Kleenex", "Xerox") there must be a generic term for the product ("Tissue", "Photocopier"); if one doesn't exist then Molex can't enforce their trademark on "Mini-Fit(tm) Jr(tm)"
Additionally, I'm hoping to find the standard that specifies these connectors. After using and examining a lot of them, there appears to be a method to the madness of the keying. You'll notice that some of the pins are square and some are chamfered. Right off the bat that prevents upside-down insertion so long as the male connector (which has a female housing) contains at least one chamfered pin. However it also helps prevent insertion of incompatible connectors: for the vast majority of connectors in this family, each column of two pins has one chamfered and one un-chamfered pin. This means that for a two-row connector with n pins there are 2^(n/2) possible keyings. The ATX connector above is a great example of this. Another example is the 6-pin male PCIe connector shown below:
However there are exceptions! I've come across GPUs before with the connector below that have two chamfered pins in the middle column:
These require a cable that also has two chamfered pins (chamfered male requires chamfered female, but square male will mate with either chamfered or square female) like this one:
Clearly there are a lot of subtleties here. Molex has an irritating habit of not fully describing the connector in the product name; for example the connector above is "Conn Power HDR 6 POS 4.2mm Solder ST Thru-Hole 6 Terminal 1 Port" which does not distinguish between the (at least) two possible incompatible keyings!
All of this brings me to the second question:
Is there a standard that names the possible keyings so that a particular keying can be searched for?
A lot of great information on this topic (but, unfortunately, not the answer to my question) can be found at All about the various PC power supply cables and connectors