The Single 12V Rail SilverStone Olympia OP650
by Christoph Katzer on July 13, 2007 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
Cables and Connectors
All cables extending out from the power supply are sleeved up to the first connector. After the first connector the cables are left without. Here Silverstone tries to save some cash since it is not easy (and therefore expensive) to sleeve the cables after the first connector. The yellow cables are marked with different colors as is done with PSUs having more than two 12v rails. Indeed we will see more evidence of this later: the PCB Silverstone used in this power supply was originally designed with four separated 12v rails.
The cables have a minimum length of about 20" and connectors are spaced at about 5". The OP650 has two 6-pin PEG connectors which enables it to run a decent SLI or Crossfire system. In addition there is an 8-pin PEG connectors which is necessary for PCIe v2.0 compliant graphics cards requiring more than 225W of power (like the AMD Radeon HD 2900 XT with overdrive enabled). The six SATA and four 4-pin drive connectors are definitely enough to run a high-end system.
All cables extending out from the power supply are sleeved up to the first connector. After the first connector the cables are left without. Here Silverstone tries to save some cash since it is not easy (and therefore expensive) to sleeve the cables after the first connector. The yellow cables are marked with different colors as is done with PSUs having more than two 12v rails. Indeed we will see more evidence of this later: the PCB Silverstone used in this power supply was originally designed with four separated 12v rails.
The cables have a minimum length of about 20" and connectors are spaced at about 5". The OP650 has two 6-pin PEG connectors which enables it to run a decent SLI or Crossfire system. In addition there is an 8-pin PEG connectors which is necessary for PCIe v2.0 compliant graphics cards requiring more than 225W of power (like the AMD Radeon HD 2900 XT with overdrive enabled). The six SATA and four 4-pin drive connectors are definitely enough to run a high-end system.
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Araemo - Friday, July 13, 2007 - link
That makes sense, and makes me think my guess about the 20A limit is possibly a contributing factor - It would be a safety issue if someone hung 40A worth of fans, lights, motorized case windows, whatever you want.. off of one pair of wires (IE, one molex connector feeding into the mass of extenders and passthrough connectors that most fans and lights I've seen use.).You'd likely overheat the wires carrying all that power, if not the connectors as well, which could cause fire or electrocution hazards.
While a GPU may draw significantly more than 20A, they are also using 3 pairs now, so the actual power draw will be closer to 20A per pair.
DerekWilson - Friday, July 13, 2007 - link
The PCIe V2.0 PSUs I've seen suggest only using connectors from the same 12V rail for PCIe graphics cards -- because if you don't, you'll be connecting the common from two different 12V rails together.This can cause issues.
If a graphics card has one 4pin and 1 8pin connector, like the HD 2900 XT, the GPU can potentially draw up to 225W from a single 12V rail through 2x PCIe graphics power connectors (3 pairs). That's about 19 amps through one rail for one PSU, but not over each pair.
SilthDraeth - Friday, July 13, 2007 - link
They explained it.The Intel ATX standard calls for no more than 20 Amps per 12V rail. So in order to avoid maxing out a single 12V rail at 20 Amps, PSUs have multiple rails support up to 20 Amps each.
If you use a single rail that can max out at 54 Amps as stated here, then you do not need the additional rails, but you are going against the ATX standard.
Duraz0rz - Friday, July 13, 2007 - link
Also, I didn't see if there was a reason that it was advertised as a single rail, yet you have 4 12V rails.Nice article...really love the line curves for the load outputs. One thing I noticed missing is ripple testing. Any reason why it's not here?
SilthDraeth - Friday, July 13, 2007 - link
That confused me as well. I think they mentioned that the PSU supposedly includes an ability to turn the other rails off, but it doesn't work, and it always has 4. They did state the PCB was originally designed for 4 rails.Duraz0rz - Friday, July 13, 2007 - link
Nevermind...disregard my statement about the ripple testing. I probably just missed it in the original article after skimming the comments from it :)