Pover supply ATX 12 VOLT
You know, what's crazyif you think about it. Even going back 20 years, whether we're talking 20pin versus 24 pin ATX, or four versus eight pin CPU connectors. Motherboards and power supplies, have been mostly interchangeable. You just left some pins unpopulated or had the extras hanging off the side, and the system would limpalong as best as it could. Well, today, that all changes. As far as I can tell, I amthe first to go hands on, with the brand new ATX12VO standard.
Now, this looks perfectlynormal at first glance, but wait, what about this? Gone, is the 24 pin connector. Gone, is the five volt rail. Gone, is the 3.3 volt rail. They're not there! This will not work with your motherboard. But why though Linus? Why do you wait so long totell us about your sponsor? Like GlassWire. With GlassWire, you can instantly see your current and past network activity, detect malware and blockbadly behaving apps on your PC or Android device. Use offer code Linus toget 25% off GlassWire, at the link below. (bright upbeat music) We don't have much inthe way of packaging, these are not retail units,actually, either of them. But, we're gonna do ourbest to un-box this thing. So, perfectly normal looking in every way, except if you look really closely. All we've got is 12 voltsand 12 volts standby. None of the other typical rails that you'd find on a power supply. Also the cabling harness, has some extra little surprises for us. Replacing our 24 pinconnector, is this right here. So it's like a 10 pin brick, but there's actually onlynine conductors in it for whatever reason that would be. We've got a four plus four pin, so the 12 volt CPU connector remains. In fact, this unit has yup,here we go, two of them. There's another one of those. We've got a handful ofsix pin and six plus twos for our graphics cards. And then the other notable omission, is where's all the SATAand Molex connectors? Well, we do have one lead, that's got a SATA and then two Molexes. But if you look, the 3.3 voltand five volt conductors, aren't there. So, they're just 12 volt, which means whateveryou're powering with these, would have to not requireany five volt power. So for example, if youhad a fan controller or like a front panel thing on your case, that used to say the connector, but only needed 12 volt power,you can use it for this. So it's mechanically compatible, but not necessarilyelectrically compatible, with every device that it would plug into. There's gonna be someheadache and heartache, in this transition. Now that's curious, one of these six pins, is keyed the same as aPCI express connector, which would lead me to believe that it delivers the same voltages, but it's not labeled PCIe, which I have to wonderis that intentional, Is it intended to be used... It is, how interesting! Let's take a look at the motherboard. This is the ASRock Z490Phantom Gaming 4SR. And to my knowledge, this isthe only ATX12VO motherboard, that's actually in existence right now outside of just a lab somewhere. ASRock worked with Intelto develop this thing, and other than the ATX12VOportion of the board, flab look at in a moment here,it's pretty normal looking. So you got your LGA 1200socket, dual channel memory, you got your BRM cooling, you got your dual PCIe x16slot, all that normal stuff. But here, up here, this is where things get spicy. So, that's where that10 pin connector goes. This is called the ATX12VO connector, and then that second six pin, that is otherwise identicalto PCI express six pin, is apparently called, ATX Board Power 2. And then these are fascinating. So just like we saw on the Mac pro, where if you wanted toplug in a SATA drive, you actually had to plugoff of the motherboard in order to deliver power to it. Well, we're seeing exactlythe same thing here. So these are SATA of powerconnector one and two.
Remember what I said aboutthat SATA power connector on the power supply. It doesn't have all the conductors in it. So, we actually need to take12 volt into the motherboard, use this DC to DC conversion circuitry, and then come out here, in order to properlypower up a SATA drive. Before you ask whereyou can buy it though, this motherboard is not intended for sales in the regular channel. And it's actually for system integrators, who want to be among the firstto adopt this new standard. Let's talk about why, but first, some background. - [Man] I don't wanna learn! - Too bad. At a very basiclevel, a computer power supply, converts the AC or alternatingcurrent from your wall into the DC or direct current, that the integrated circuitsin your PC need to operate. A CPU's logic gateswouldn't work very well, if the electrons wereflowing first one way, then the other, 60 times a second. The harder part of a power supply's job, is that it needs tosimultaneously do this, multiple times over. Supplying a variety of different voltages, to the various parts of your system. And, it needs to outputwithin very tight tolerances, to avoid unnecessary wear and tear. Think about how your houselightsmight dim a little bit, when you fire up your clothes dryer. That ain't ideal forsensitive electronics. So a good power supplyprovides steady, clean power to for example, your graphics card, whether your CPU issitting there doing nothing or just spinning up abig rendering project. The final challenge for a power supply, is that it needs to doall of this efficiently. Not only does any wastedenergy get converted to heat, making your PC run hotter and louder, due to the extra cooling requirements, It also just plain wastes energy, putting more strain onthe electrical grid, and adding more pollutionto the environment, with no real benefit whatsoever.
So on the one hand, it'sgreat that we've enjoyed this period of unprecedented intergenerational compatibility, because the evolutionsof the ATX standard, have been mostly gearedaround delivering more juice, to keep up with evermorepower-hungry hardware. But on the other hand, meanwhile, the rest of the world hasbeen barreling towards an energy consumption crisis of humanity threatening proportions. And industries like utilities,transportation, HVAC, and consumer electronics, have been under pressurefrom regulatory bodies, to ever more aggressiveenergy efficiency targets. So that, is what'sdriving the new standard that we're looking at here. Now, to be clear, it's notlike computer power supplies, haven't gotten more efficient.
80 Plus marketing has been great, for raising consumer awarenessof power supply efficiency. But, something you probably don't know, is that a basic 80 Pluscertified power supply, is only required to hit 80%efficiency, at 20% load or more. Which only really happens when you're actually doingsomething with your computer. Let's take this machine for example. It's got a 650 watt power supply, and sitting here at the Windows desktop, it's sucking back anywherebetween 60 and 80 Watts. That's only about 9%. At these kinds of loads,according to Intel, we could be looking at aslow as 50 to 60% efficiency. Let's swap out the powersupply and motherboard, with our new ATX12VOsetup and see how it goes. I actually have not triedthis so, good luck everybody. Now, I may have put myself ata bit of a disadvantage here, because, the lower you go interms of power consumption, the less efficient aconventional power supply is.
So, the fact that I even have a discrete graphics card in here, means that we might notsee as extreme improvement as we would if we wererunning say, onboard graphics. Things like RGB lights on the memory, are also going to contribute to that. I do still wanna give it a crack though, given that this motherboardthat we're trying out here, is marketed as, I mean,gaming is right in the name, and it would be prettytypical for a gamer, to not at least have some manner of discrete graphics card in their system. My muscle memory was like, I'mhooking up a new motherboard, I'm gonna put in my... (laughing loudly) So I hook up the new power supply. I've seen articles about this, but I'm pretty sure I'm the first one to actually hook one up outside of a lab. The fact that we have so many pins, I mean, it's 10 plus six, this is 16 pins. It sort of raises the question, why didn't they just do like,two eight pin connectors, which we already have? And if they didn't wanna reuseconnectors we already have, why did they use a PCIe six pin? That seems like if partof the goal was to reduce the bulk of the connectors, then, mission not accomplished. 'Cause, it's like very similar. Oh, is that it? Wait, are we ready? ATX12VO.
Here we go, ladies and gentlemen, I'm rooting for you ATX12VO. Oh, excellent. Date and time not set, who cares? This is huge, I was not expecting this. - [David] Holy crap! - [Linus] Right? That's actually way betterthan I was expecting. You know what the crazy part of this is? I was just guessing at whatkind of grade of efficiency power supply this was. If you Google this part number, literally zero Googleresults come up, nothing. So I was just guessing650, I know it's 650 watt, but I was guessing GD, was gonna mean that they were targeting kind of 80 Plus Gold-ish efficiency.
So that's why we picked an80 Plus Gold power supply. So this is a Seasonic FOCUSGold, to compare it to. And even though we've got agraphics card and everything, we just cut our idle power consumption, literally in half, less than half. - [David] What about like rendering? - I'm really glad you asked. So, these changes are really focused on idle power consumption. And once you reach the wheelhouse, of a conventional power supply, which is typically around 50% load, the advantages pretty much disappear. So, that was why I didn'tdo like a heavy load test before and after, I'm not expecting really any savings there. So, that raises the question, why is this so much better? I'm so glad we got this result because the rest of the video is scripted according to it's better.
Here's the thing, convertingfrom AC to DC power, is extremely inefficient. And conventional power supplies do it multiple times, for the multiple voltages, that they need to supply. Now, it's actually better togo from AC to 12 volt only like we're doing here and then derive the otherrequired DC voltages from that. So, Intel figures, we should be able to getas high as 75% efficiency, even at just eight to 10 watts. But, Linus you might say, some high-end power suppliesdo that already anyway? So, to meet upcoming energyefficiency standards, like top runner from Japan, CECTier 2, and ENERGY STAR 8.0, Intel, and their partnerswent a step further.
That is why the 12 volt down conversion, is taking place here on the motherboard, rather than in the power supply. Because, the higher the voltage, the less conduction losswe're gonna need to deal with, over the runs of wire thatgo to the motherboard. So by having only 12volt and 12 volt standby coming from the power supply, you actually get marginallyless loss there as well. Now, there is an increase in board space and you can see here,how much is required, for not just the voltage conversion, but even these extraconnectors that you need for things like, you know, hard drives. But, Intel says that fromthe boards that they've seen, this is still achievablefor micro ATX boards.
Now it'll add some costson the motherboard side, but you should end up saving some costs on the power supply side, and it should end up beingabout a wash for the consumer. So, it works, now what? For most people, nothing. At the moment, this standard is poisedto play a much bigger role in system integrated machines, that are targeting government, or other institutions thathave efficiency targets to hit, while the 24 Pins standard, still makes up for its inefficiency, with the convenience of forwardand backwards compatibility for enthusiasts. In the longterm though, who knows? It might end up being big success like the EPS eight pin CPU connector, that was ultimately adopted by AMD as processor power consumptionexploded in the early knots, or it might be a crushingfailure like BTX, which incidentally wasalso an Intel standard that started out as asystem integrator only play. Speaking of play,(drumbeat rolling) play me off to the, whatever, sponsor.
Thanks to Squarespace forsponsoring today's video. You may have heard of Squarespace, it's the easy way to makea website in minutes. Squarespace is a leader in website design, and they're all in one platform, allows you to do everything. From designing your website, to creating copy, uploading rich media and you can even buydomains through Squarespace, and create email campaigns.
I
can do all kinds of stuff now, compared to when we first started with our Squarespace sponsorships, they have so much functionality. You can make any website. From a personal portfolio,to a resume, to fan fiction, or even shopping. They've got analytics tools, to help you track howyour website is doing and find all the weak areas to make sure you've gotto stay stream of traffic. And, it's super easy to use. Both our Linus Media Groupand LTX EXFIL websites, were built quickly using Squarespace.
And if you ever do getstuck making a website, they've got a 24/7 support team that's ready to help you out. So go to squarespace.com/LTTfor a free trial, and when you're ready to launch,you can get 10% off today. If you guys enjoy these kindsof tech, you're deep dives, and you're looking forsomething else to watch, maybe check out our newone-X server rollout. We collabed with Wendell on that one. And it goes into sort of why an SSD can be too fast for your computer, and actually cause all kinds of stability and data corruption issues. Oh, I never mentioned LTTstore.com, go check that out too.
No comments:
Post a Comment