MOLEX PERIPHERAL POWER CONNECTOR INSTALL

Notice they say DETECT where normally in a molex connector is 5v - so I would guess they simply check if there's 5v on that pin to figure out if you plugged a molex connector or not. In the second scenario, with a single video card you could plug the molex connector in any molex header and it wouldn't matter.

MOLEX PERIPHERAL POWER CONNECTOR INSTALL

In the first scenario, if you install a single video card, you would only need to connect a molex for that slot or pair of slots. The motherboard will most likely only do a 'Is voltage present in the molex connectors? ' check and won't actually measure how much power comes through connector. If the motherboard requires all molex connectors to be connected to the power supply or it won't start, then you could 'hack it' to think you plugged the connectors. But if the motherboard is designed in such a way that the pci-e slots only get power from molex connectors (which would be dumb) then you would have to plug at least one molex connector in the motherboard.

If you have a single video card in the motherboard, you could probably be fine without any molex connectors, because the slot would receive power from the 24 pin connector. each molex adds around 50 watts to those 200 watts. That's why the motherboard added those molex connectors, to ADD some power on top of what's available through the 24 pin connector(s') 12v wires. The motherboard can give the pci-e slots some power from the 24 pin connector (there's around 150-200w available there, 2 12v wires, each good for around 9A, so 18A x 12v = 216w, but some of that goes to fan headers, maybe some onboard stuff) but if you install 4-6 video cards and each takes 60 watts, you're looking at 240-360 watts taken from pci-e slots. I'd be fine doing 50-55w on molex connectors.Ī video card is allowed to take as much as 75w from a pci-e slot : 10w on 3.3v and 65w on 12v. The maximum rating of a single molex connector is 5A per voltage (so 5A on 12v, 5A on 5v ). so in theory a sata connector can do 12v x 4.5 = 54w. The maximum rating of SATA is 4.5A (3 contacts for each voltage x 1.5A per contact = 4.5A). Wouldnt it be bad to use sata to molex because the molex port might take 75W but sata has like 60 or 65 W ? Of course don't actually use such adapter cables to actually use multiple video cards on the board. If the motherboard really wants all molex connectors to be 'populated' you can also buy adapters that convert one molex or one sata into 2 molex connectors. The extra molex connectors would be to provide additional power to the pci-e slots, because otherwise all pci- slots would be powered from just 2 12v wires in the 24 pin connector. Try turning on the motherboard with just the 24 pin connector and the cpu 4/8 pin connector. It's common for a cable to have 3-4 connectors, usually 2-3 sata and a molex connector. * Ironically, unlike almost all the other internal ATX power connectors, the Peripheral Power Connector was actually a Mate-n-Lok connector designed by Amphenol.Your beQuiet power supply has 'peripheral' connectors on it, in which you can plug cables that have a bunch of connectors. Personally I'd have loved to see a move to Micro-fit across the board with ATX12VO to further compact board area for cabling, but I'd have even more rather seen a move to 48V internal power rather than sticking with legacy 12V. Similarly, standardising on the new 16-pin connector means the old 6-pin and 8-pin connectors can eventually be phased out. Even for cards there were only a few watts over the 75W card-edge power budget, they were saddled with a 'no need' 6-pin 75W power connector, even if they could have worked just fine with a Molex connector. Those vanished as soon as mini-fit Jr was adopted for GPU power.

However, there's no need for it with the lower-clocked GeForce RTX 4070 and inferior models.Standardisation.Īnyone who remembers early GPUs will remember cards with 'Molex'* connectors for external power input.

Molex peripheral power connector