newbie99 said:
I got my A8N-E and a WD SATA drive. Found out the board needs a 24 pin
power connector. I bought a cheap casew/PS that only has the 20 pin
connector and no connectors for SATA either. Do I have to shell out $$$
for a new power supply to run both or are their cheap adapters I can use?
For SATA drives, there are a number of possibilities. In
the few pictures I could find with the WDC connector area
exposed, it looks like there is a standard four pin power
cable on there. You could, for example, use a WDC WDSC50RCW
SecureConnect cable for just the data connection, then use
the legacy molex disk drive connector for power. As shown
here:
http://www.wdc.com/en/library/sata/2579-001075.pdf
Some SATA drives have a SATA power area and a legacy power
connector. You only need to connect one of the two of them.
AFAIK, at the moment, the drives are still using +5V and +12V,
and the drives may not be using any lower voltages which are
only available via the SATA power connector. That means either
power connector would suffice. When the day comes that drives
use lower voltages, the legacy connector will disappear.
As for the 20 versus 24 pin thing, if your video card is not
a top of the line card (say, maybe a X300 or something), then
you would be under the six amp limit for the single +12V pin
on the 20 pin connector. The 20 pin will fit if it is right
justified (pushed to one end of the 24 pin motherboard
connector). Examine the plastic housing around each pin, and
you'll discover there is only one way to insert the power
cable, without any of the connector "hanging out over the end".
As long as the 20 pin is fully mated with 20 of the pins on
the 24 pin connector, it should work. If you cannot seem
to get the housing to line up, post back here for more advice,
rather than force something and break it.
"20 pin PSU meets 24 pin motherboard"
http://www.d-cross.net/cgi-bin/show_article/upload/11/intel-775p4-atx.jpg
If you are using a high end video card, in order to continue
to use the 20 pin power connector, you need to get some data.
The sum of the current draw of your video card from the +12V rail,
plus the sum of the currents drawn by the 12V fans connected to
the motherboard fan headers, must be less than 6 amps total. If
you allow about 1 amp for the fans, that leaves 5 amps for the
video card.
For example, Xbitlabs measures current on video cards, and on
this page they measured 4.35amps on +12V. I think that is about
as far as I would want to push a 20 pin power connector. When
you use a 24 pin connector, there are two pins to carry +12V,
meaning up to 12 amps (minus 1 amp for fans) could be drawn
by PCI Express cards.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/geforce6600gt-oc_3.html
"Thus, almost all the power the card consumes comes from the
12v line. The consumed current on this line is 4.07amp and rises
to 4.35amp at overclocking."
Now, in all of the above, I have not discussed how much power
the power supply should be able to produce. The above is only
addressing the possibility of melting the single +12V pin on
the 20 pin ATX power connector. I don't really know what
kind of breakdown the Athlon64 boards use for power. If we
allocate 6 amps for fans and video, 8.3 amps for a 90% efficient
conversion of power for a 90 watt processor, we are talking a
minimum of 15 amps of +12V rating printed on the label on the
side of the power supply. If the 3.3V has at least 15 amps
and the 5V has 15 to 20 amps minimum, that might be enough to
cover the other requirements - that is purely a guesstimate
with no basis in fact. You can try a tool like the following,
to get a conservative estimate of consumption per rail.
Start at the top of the list and enter your config. This is
likely using Javascript:
http://takaman.jp/D/?english
HTH,
Paul
