square power socket on AMD 64 boards

[Peter Wemm]

On Friday 24 September 2004 09:46 am, Lars Tunkrans wrote:
> Rob wrote:
> > Is it mandatory to use this square socket or just an option?
>
> IT IS Mandatory !!!

Depends.  Some boards work with it disconnected, others won't power up.  
I have several that don't care.  There is 12V power coming in via the 
main atx plug as well.

Some boards bus together all the 12V power sources.  Others run the cpu 
voltage regulator exclusively from the 4-pin socket.  If you have a 
board that uses the former (it seems many athlon64 boards are), then 
the only risk is that your motherboard may be drawing more 12V power 
than the PSU can handle.  You'll see this by watching the hardware 
monitor showing a serious drop in the 12V rail.

Again though, I haven't seen any that this is a problem.  I'd expect 
this to be a bigger problem in the pentium-4 world.  

Of course, you can always get a hard-drive plug -> 4-pin atx adapter 
cable too.
-- 
Peter Wemm - peter at wemm.org; peter at FreeBSD.org; peter at yahoo-inc.com
"All of this is for nothing if we don't go to the stars" - JMS/B5