The Future of Power Supplies - Maybe (Motherboard Cost, Cables, & ATX12VO)

The Cost Increase of 12V to 5V and 12V to 3.3V Circuits: What Does it Mean for You?

Most of the cost increase associated with 12V to 5V and 12V to 3.3V circuits is not significant, which is good news. However, a closer look at the components and manufacturing process reveals that the bulk of the cost increase comes from bigger PCB sizes and more layers to accommodate these newer circuits. This is particularly evident in ATX boards, where the cost increase can be as high as 24%, mostly due to increased PCB size and two additional PCB layers. However, it's worth noting that this increase in cost is largely absorbed by the manufacturer's existing design changes, which would have been made anyway to improve signal integrity on four-layer boards.

The Advent of DDR5 and PCIe Gen 5: A Shift Towards Better Power Efficiency

Typically, most of these boards are moving away from four-layer PCBs due to limitations in signal integrity. The advent of DDR5 and PCIe Gen 5 has accelerated this trend, as newer components require more layers for signaling. This means that manufacturers can absorb some of the cost increase associated with these new technologies into their existing designs.

ATX2: A More Environmentally Conscious Power Supply Option

A recent development in power supply technology is ATX2, which offers better power efficiency in low-power states or extremely low-power states. Assuming no cost for replacing old power supplies, this change could be a more environmentally conscious direction to take. By switching to ATX2 power supplies, manufacturers and consumers can reduce the overall draw on the power grid, which is particularly important when considering large-scale production.

Adapting Existing Power Supplies: A Possible Solution

For those who already own 12V boards that don't have a 12V non-O counterpart, there are ways to adapt these existing power supplies. This might involve adding a new adapter cable or modifying the PCB size and design. However, it's unlikely that manufacturers will push for DIY adaptations, as industry inertia and existing ecosystem constraints can make such changes difficult.

The Future of Power Supply Pricing

For ATX size boards, six-layer Enthusiast boards, pricing is not expected to change much. The additional cost is due to the extra layers and board space required for these newer circuits. However, smaller boards may see a slight increase in pricing due to the same requirements. It's also worth noting that some of these components can be more compact, such as the optional 10-pin power connector.

SATA Power Management: A Source of Headaches

SATA power management is another area where changes in circuit design can make K management worse. This highlights the need for careful consideration when designing and selecting power supply components to minimize potential issues.

Conclusion

The transition from 12V to newer voltage standards is an ongoing process that affects various aspects of power supply technology. As manufacturers continue to develop more efficient and reliable power supplies, consumers can expect changes in pricing, design, and performance. By staying informed about these developments, you can make the most of your next purchase and stay ahead of the curve when it comes to power supply technology.

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"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthe power supply spec that we use in basically every computer these days is from 1995 at least for the cabling and there's been some effort to move over to ATX 12 vo which is this one this 10 pin does pretty close to the same thing functionally as the old 24 pin but it's really been slow to pick up even though Intel wrote the spec for both of these and it wrote the 12 V spec some time ago Intel's vision for the future along with a lot of the industry is a future where the power supply only does 12 volts or 12 vo 12 volts only as opposed to everything else that a standard today power supply in most PCS would use so 3.3 volts 5 volts -12 volts all of that goes away but it still has to be addressed because components still use it so all of it shifts to the motherboard this topic we've talked about a few times but now we finally have some components here like this 12 vo motherboard which if you're used to PC building with a 24 pin starts to look kind of crazy but today we're going to talk about whether this is going to become a reality and provide some stronger fundamentals on the basics of what this might mean for PC Building because again we've got stuff like this fsp 12 vo power supply there's a Corsair prototype well pretty close to final 12 vo on here we've got the MSI board and there's some stuff to talk about now before that this video is brought to you by lenoe cloud computing from aamai our web host provider that we've been using for over a decade now in our experience as a long-term customer of linode theyve reliable server Solutions and make server setup Easy by providing all kinds of first install scripts and launch points you can quickly build your own self-hosted VPN Game servers for csgo Minecraft and more by using their quick start guides and extremely detailed documentation we also have firsthand experience with their support team and can vouch for the quality even when all the mistakes were mine visit l ./ Gamers Nexus to get a $100 credit when you sign up today or click the link below so even though an atx2 volt only power supply doesn't provide the other voltages the PC still needs them it needs them for things like for example pcie where this pcie Riser we've actually split out the different voltage rails on this that's for monitoring specifically for our testing where there's 12vt lines that are split apart we've got 3.3 and we've got 5vt lines and each of these sort of clusters of wires is a different voltage for the most part and that's something that still has to be provided for the computer it's just not done by the power sply anymore and that means it moves to the motherboard where under the atx2 vo standard and specification all of those other voltages are handled here so there have to be dedicated vrms where you see clusters like this or over here that may handle uh the other voltage conversions even these small four pin connectors on the board that's for a cable something like this for SATA where SATA ssds are not 12v and so you now move this cable from the power supply where it is typically with 12vt ATX 12v uh to the motherboard gets kind of weird but that's how they're doing it it feels more like an oem system another couple examples too of things that aren't 12vt only a lot of LEDs involve 5volt headers uh op drives is another example that's less common these days and if we look at like the modm as well not intended as a plug but it's certainly uh is useful for this and you can grab one in store. Gamers access.net so I'll plug it anyway but you see like a Molex connector here on the mat with pin out has 5 volts the old 24 pin it's got 5 volts these three here we've got minus1 12 there's a 3.3 and uh then for RGB connections some of those are 5 volts also but a lot of other stuff is 12 volts already so it's not too big of a jump for the CPU or for the GPU it's actually not a jump at all so we have an existing article and video on the topic if you want a deep dive of what the spec is exactly but for the basics this becomes a loop where you either convert those voltages on the board or in the power supply so shifting it between one or the other feels like it's sort of a pointless shering of responsibility by the power supply and pushing it onto the board vendors but moving these conversion to the board is according to Intel better for lower overall power draw when the PC is in a low power state or especially in standby mode and if you think of a small overall uplift in standby multiplied across hundreds of computers in an office building or maybe tens of millions of computers in large metropolitan areas it actually does start to add up pretty fast so where these small efficiency benefits for a single consumer are functionally irrelevant won't really change how much you pay in power bills uh certainly it's more wasteful to just get rid of your current good power supply and swap it only because of a spec change although you can do adapters that we'll talk about but where it's irrelevant there it is actually useful at a large scale so there's some sense to it and coming back to that topic one of the early concerns we saw from our audience from you all with 12v was that it would potentially nullify perfectly good power supplies high-end stuff or anything that may have another decade of life as long as the cables don't change suddenly become suspect as to whether you can continue using it if 12v over catches on but it hasn't yet it's been years now and it hasn't gotten anywhere it's just the furthest we've gone is like one random oneoff motherboard from MSI with no vrm heat sinks and a couple of power supplies out there so it's not like a fast moving change but when or if it ever does switch over tables like this are what will resolve it where uh you can potentially adapt to existing power supplies or convert a 24 pin into a 10 pin 12 vo connector so since atx12v power supplies already make 12 volts it would be possible theoretically to use one to power an ATX 12 motherboard except for one problem which is standby voltage in traditional power supplies there's a separate 5volt rail called 5 volts standby or 5 vsb in 12v that's replaced by 12 V USB even with a custom pinned cable that one change actually makes the two standards functionally incompatible unless you also convert the 5 vsb to 12 vsb and corser has this adapter cable for doing exactly that there are a lot of empty pins on the power supply side of the cable that correspond to all the voltages that atx2 drops and some grounds this goes from any type four pin out Corsair power supply with the company's standard 18 pin and 10 pin motherboard connectors to an ATX 12 vo 10 pin motherboard connector there's actually an inline circuit in these and we're going to cut this one open to see what actually it looks like so here's the inline converter and that's what's doing all the really important lifting of just converting 5sb to 12 VB so that the computer can actually function and we'll take the uh cheap be quiet knife that they sent us to cut open the corser cable and check it out so there's some heat shrink uh on the PCB all right okay so there's the PCB it's actually kind of a lot going on in here I mean this is a large chunk to just include in line nothing really on the back side except for the solder joints and on the top side uh there's an fairly large inductor there's some filtering capacitors and if we get a closeup you'll see that up top with the purple sleeving near the inductor there's labeling for 5vt standby there's an accompanying ground next to it and then the yellow line is 12 volts and then the other side with the purple sleeving it's 12vt standby and then ground for the accompanying wire so this is in fact where the conversion is happening and this is what allows you to make a 12volt power supply basically turned into 12v kind of basically this is the answer to the concern of if boards start to go for 10 pins and 12 vo but people don't want to replace their perfectly good 10year warranty power supplies that's how you kind of bridge the gap uh ideally this ends up closer to the power supply be better for cable management but otherwise uh despite being bulky it's a solution so to give you a preview in case this ever takes off for the PC DIY scene of what this standard looks like we have three power supplies here we have a very small small form factor fsp power supply this is 12 vo and actually we'll just do a quick zoom in on the label here normally these labels are filled with all kinds of information for the other voltages but it's pretty simple you've got 12vt standby and 12 volts that's it so this is one now these are not to be confused with the sort of impostor 12 vo power supplies you see in prebuilt where Dell and HP uh for their consumer Division A lot of times they'll take their server power supplies that are only 12 volts but are not 12 Vo confusingly and so you end up with that 10 pin connector but it's pinned differently and uh it might not even fit at all because the actual keying of the connector is different next power supp we have is this corser unit and this is an rm850 but you can see that it is a pvt sample we'll talk about that in a second so this is an 850 W power supply we have another one here this is also an rm850 and uh it is not marked as a pvt sample and you can see the PBT came in this not retail product box so let's get started with these the only obvious differences between them aside from the stickers and the printing are the main motherboard connector and the type of 12pin pcie cable and header this unit without a printed sticker is handm marked as a production validation test unit or pvt this is basically the last step before the retail product and all features should match retail it has a 10 pin motherboard connector as you would expect and a pcie power cable with a microfit 12 pin like what's used on the RTX 30 series Fe cards the power supply side terminates into a regularized mini fit 12 pin otherwise this looks like a normal power supply the unit with a printed sticker actually has real packaging but it lacks printing around the connectors it has an access hole for adjusting what's probably a variable resistor but we're not sure exactly what function it serves instead of having a 10 pin on the power supply side this one has a 12 pin for the motherboard cable we don't know why CER chose to do it this way but on the board side of the cable there are two wires doubled up on pin two and pin six or ground and power okay respectively this power supply has a newer 12 plus 4 pin 12vt high power cable and it terminates into a 16 pin on the power supply it's interesting to see since we know that qusair ultimately decided to do this as two standard eight pins instead it's likely both Solutions are adequate but doing two separate eight pins allows Corsair to keep wider compatibility it also came with this clearly custom cable on the power supply side it goes into the main motherboard 12 pin header but the motherboard side is a 24 pin it's just missing a lot of those pins we traced this out and it's missing the 5vt and the 3.3 volt that would normally be in an atx1 12vt non 24 pin and this is a 12v power supply so that makes sense we think this might have been for a custom test board especially since it's got these probe points connected to the back side of two terminals also the yellow wire is tagged as I PSU which is a new signaling pin added to the ATX 12 standard and the last 12v only power supply that we have right now is this tiny fsp sfx unit so this is the one that is rated for 750 wats Max and on the power supply side the motherboard connector is a 12 pin right there uh and there's no dedicated 12vt high power on this one it's pretty simple this makes sense for a mini it X build um but otherwise there's really not a lot of cabling on it not a lot of features not a lot of pcie connectivity it's a pretty basic power supply that clearly the main point is small that's kind of it this is where we get into some of the confusing sort of wannabe standards where clearly on the 12 vo spec it takes a lot less room the surface area generally speaking of the 10 pin is much smaller they've got a six over here still smaller and that's kind of somewhat optional but uh we'll talk about that in a minute so much smaller footprint and a lot fewer wires to deal with in the cable itself of course but because 10 pin connections exist again and OEM builds from companies like dnhp you have to be careful about mixing and matching those because if the key in happens to be the same or you force it to fit which is basically always a bad sign with the power cable uh you could definitely end up killing components because you might be Crossing 12 volts to ground or something like like that if it even is 12 vo the power supply you're pulling from an oem system it just happens to have a 10 pin so you have to be careful about that already being kind of on the market but not being the 12o spec it's very confusing that way so back to the 24 pin standard this is again the pin out for it and you can see this only has uh two 12 volts right here and it's got all the required voltages for the PC so five and everything else that you lack in 12v but with only two 12vt connectors this can technically only provide up to 192 watt of 12 volts assuming the power supply and the cables can do 8 amps per pin and considering the most power hungry things in computers uh run mostly 12 volts that's not a lot of power but the main difference here is those power hungry things are either going to be fed their power through multiple or one of these eight pins with the CPU so is different cable entirely or through the pcie cable for the GPU but the new 10 pin 12v connector can handle a lot more power to the board directly which opens up some interesting possibilities as long as the rest of the computer's designed around it so here's that pin out for 12v it's got none of those other voltages and it has one more 12vt connection than the 24 pin making up for a total of 288 watts of 12vt power aside from that pin one is for turning the power supply on pin six is for power okay and pin 7 is the 12 vsb that replaced 5 vsb Pin 5 calls for its own discussion though so pin five is pretty interesting it's new to the 12v spec and it's required going forward it's specifically for iore PSU percent and as for what that means the spec defines it as this quote ipsu per is a signal coming from the power supply that reports the proportionality of power being delivered by the 12vt DC rail with the output load rating of the power supply this is represent presented as a unitless percentage of the total capacity using a current mode if multiple 12vt DC rails are implemented for example 12 vol1 DC and 12 vol2 DC then ipsu perc must report the utilization ratio of the combined total capacity so to distill the spec jargon basically uh this is to allow for brief overpower conditions to be reported back so it's a useful function it's actually kind of helpful and good for the the PC in general but ironically the ipsu percent signal is sent out as a 3.3 volt signal despite being 12 vo otherwise for the power supply and it sends the that signal to the motherboard in 10 Micro amp uh steps which then uh maps to 1% utilization per step on a scale of 0 to 200% for total power utilization of uh of the system so again you get back to brief overpower situations being reported that doesn't mean that all atx2 vo power supplies are required to deliver up to 200% of rated capacity it's just the reporting range in our own power supply reviews in the past we've seen that they run closer to 130 to 134% prior to overpower protection extremely short power excursions of up to 110 microc at 200% capacity are required on power supplies of 450 Watts or greater capacity per this spec and using the ipsu perc signal allows for reduced power Excursion require IR m in the power supply the intent is for the PC to be able to use the signal as a sign that it needs to quickly Throttle Down in order to not hurt the power supply or shut down due to tripping the psu's over current or overpower protection you don't want to run outside of the power supply as performance envelope regardless but overpower situations typically the way they work right now in atx2 volts is either you trip over current protection maybe you trip over Power Protection but if there's anything uh that triggers when you go overpower it's going to be one of those protections maybe the GPU is pulling too much current specifically or the whole system is but either way the result is it's off and that's how it works with this ipsu percent thing theoretically the system will be able to throttle on Power and be able to keep itself online or prevent some kind of massive failure uh if the power supply is otherwise typically insufficient in order to protect the components on the other side so that's where this is beneficial and if this becomes more popular and interesting enough it's possible that there's an ATX 12vt specification revision where they go to a new version and they add ipsu percent to a more Standard 24 pin layout power supply uh which could con cause a ton of confusion in the market if people suddenly have their systems throttling performance and they don't know why might be because they're going overpow maybe they spec him properly and they're pulling an extra 100 Watts Beyond what's intended something like that will cause rather than just a hard shutdown a new type of throttling it might be misconstrued as thermal throttling or something to that effect there is one other way that power supplies handle going over power and it's a different type of protection it looks something like this but the new approach is more graceful than the power supply exploding although much less interesting from a footage and future meming standpoint so this is what real ATX 12v motherboard looks like this is the MSI Pro h610 m2v this is one of the only ones on the market right now there's no vrm heat syncs it's h610 so can't overclock or anything like that uh and as for the power pin out it's the part that actually matters we detailed it earlier but you can see how much smaller the footprint is technically if the board is low power enough this one this 10 pin is all it needs to have to meet the spec and to turn on the extra six here is not required so this six pin Intel in the spec calls this the extra board connector and it's required on ATX 12 vo power supplies again like this that are over 450 wats and the six pin can be put on anything motherboard wise that needs to hit more than the 288 watt limit of this connector so that's what gets you the extra overhead now these connectors the only reason they'd really be under any power strain is if you had a lot of pcie slots where each full slot is limited to about 75 Watts or 12 Vol only it's TP typically 66 Watts for the 12vt spec and then the other uh nine or so comes from the other rails so the six pin on this it's physically and electrically identical to a standard PCI E6 pin that you would find powering your video card nothing new there and additionally this in itself isn't really new either because you'll find auxiliary power connectors on motherboards typically for overclocking so the high-end boards where they expect you might run multi-gpu this is more true from ages past those will have uh either a Molex or better case a pcie connector somewhere along the bottom or this the right Edge for additional power specifically so the 24 pin doesn't melt if the PCI slots are pulling Excess power that the two 12s can't handle past the 192 Watts or so uh depending on the gauge of the wire and stuff like that so that's all somewhat familiar the last cable or pin out on here that's relevant is that EPS 12 volts standard eight pin or 2x4 uh I guess technically you do one for and that's identical to the existing EPS 12 volt so nothing new there so those three inputs together can supply 960 Watts straight into the board which is way more than enough power for anything realistic to be built and we think in general that extra six pin is not going to be technically necessary but you're going to see it on a lot of boards if ATX 12 ever gets used if they're on the higher end side in the same way you might see two eight pins for EPS 12 volt even though you probably only need one it's just it starts to become associated with the higher end product but that's how it works so 960 WTS capacity and with the EPS 12vt still handling the CPU or the bulk of it that leaves the 10 and possibly the six handling everything else which really isn't much because you're basically talking about memory which in general is not that much power uh maybe something like some of these onboard ic's and components but for the most part maybe LEDs things that aren't going to really be pulling anything close to a CPU or a GPU which are handled more or less by discrete connectors at this point so uh even if you had all 75 Watts going to each PCI slot in an instance like this you're still left with 500 watts of overhead which is more than sufficient you could comfortably subtract the additional six pins contribution also and still be left with over 200 watts of Headroom so if the board has the extra connector there's no real reason to leave it unplugged but it does work without it we just question why it's being included on a board like this one that's not going to pull that much power in any reasonable scenario we talked to MSI and asked if there's any reason to use all three and the company had this to say quote Intel doesn't mention why EPS 12 Vol 8 Pin is kept but we think it might be because of protection CPU is the most power demanding it's safer to apply protection such as overcurrent independently for CPU and other components and on the topic of the additional pin MSI also said this quote for example a desktop PC not DIY or notebook is designed for office use and doesn't require big Power a 10 pin connector is enough in this scenario but for a board maker we can't know how consumers will use the pro h610 M 12 what devices will we put on the board so we offer the extra six pin now we understand the play it safe mentality here that's generally the sort of safer way to go obviously but it does sort of defeat some of the purpose of reducing the footprint of the atx12v non o spec so typical you probably throw the connector on the board to make it look more appealing to users who don't necessarily know what they're looking at they see this one has 10 plus 6 this one has 10 they buy the one with 10 plus 6 even though they're going to socket something into an h610 board that will never need it and as for after the 12 volts gets converted uh it then distributes the power wherever it needs to go so in the case of SATA for example we end up with the connector we mentioned ear earlier that actually just plugs into this really tiny spot right here and this actually maybe arguably becomes a worse situation for cable management uh there's probably going to be cleaner ways to do this but that is how you would plug in your 2 and 1 half in SSD today although nvme is taking off in such a way that a lot of people are eliminating that cable entirely but those four pin SATA connectors they use a four pin version of the same microfit terminals as the pcie 12vt high power connector making them fairly tidy for the board this four pin is officially rated for two SATA drives and there's also a six pin version rated for four we'd prefer to see them moved down near the actual SATA headers because that would make more sense for cable management but that's going to be a board level decision those are really the only significant differences between this atx2 vo board and a standard ATX 12vt board otherwise everything else is normal now these changes do move some of the cost away from power supplies into the motherboard so where the power supply might sort of like for like get a little bit cheaper because the conversion is not being done there anymore you as a consumer are still going to pay for it and they're going to make sure of that and honestly if the cost vanished entirely they'd probably still make sure you pay for it because why would they why would they stop collecting margin on something even if it no longer has part of the product but in this case it's absorbed by the motherboard because it now has additional features it needs to accommodate we talked to MSI about this MSI said quote the cost increase of 12vt to 5 volt and 12vt to 3.3 volt circuits is not much so that's the good news they said most of the cost is added from bigger PCB size and more layers to accommodate 12vt to 5vt and 12vt to 3.3 volt circuits and components for ATX boards the cost is close to non2 vo since it doesn't require bigger PCB size and more PCB layers but for microatx it needs a larger microatx PCB and six layer PCB compared to four layers being enough for a non2 vo board it might cost up to 24% more mostly from increased PCB size and two more PCB layers 24% more is a lot because from a manufacturer perspective they're not going to charge you 24% more because they paid 24% more they're going to charge you probably about double of what the cost increase actually was that's just how the margin typically works for this stuff so it's not an insignificant change now the only thing positively going for us here is that with the Advent of ddr5 and pcie Gen 5 typically most of these boards are moving away from four layers any anyway because the signal Integrity just isn't there on a four- layer board they need the additional layers for signaling anyway and so a lot of that cost is sort of absorbed in a change that they've already had to make so as quickly as possible then atx2 has better power efficiency in low power States or extremely low power States when it's like a couple Watts for total system draw that is irrelevant for an individual but multiply it across millions or hundreds of millions of PCS if suddenly like a flip of a switch everybody moved to a higher efficiency atx2 power supply uh assuming no cost for getting rid of the old stuff that would be a more environmentally conscious or power efficient direction to move which in terms of reducing the impact to the grid because remember a lot of these changes in Spec come not only from Intel but from government level or federal level contacts sometimes state level in California uh where they are looking at how do we reduce the draw the load on the actual power grid that's where a lot of this stuff comes from so um obviously there are sort of caveats of well if we just instantly invalidate all of these perfectly good power supplies it's probably actually worse to then have to buy an entirely new product to do the same thing with slightly better power efficiency but we're not going to get into that discussion today uh there are ways to adapt an existing power supply if you found yourself in possession of a 12v board that doesn't have a 12v non o counterpart it's just they're kind of the cables where you end up with you know this is just the heat shrink for it but uh a PCB the size in the instance of the test one that corser made in order to do the 12 vsb adapter so uh ipsu percent signaling is probably the most interesting aspect here that could theoretically be extracted and applied to a standard 12vt power supply not 12 vo and be useful for power throttling in instances where you're hitting over Power Protection rather than just just turning off or exploding the ladder of which is much less desirable although more interesting uh it's questionable if board makers will push the change for DIY there's lots of Industry inertia in the existing ecosystem the existing spec and they're not likely to just switch so you don't need to worry about just suddenly your power supply isn't going to work anymore and you have to buy an adapter cable probably this is going to take a very long time you're more likely to see this in OEM systems and pre-builts at a large level like Dell and HP where they build their own motherboard assuming they don't also just repin a power supply so uh for ATX size boards six plus layer Enthusiast stuff pricing is not really going to change from what we understand for smaller boards the pricing will go up uh because they have to add those extra layers and board space used is about the same if they have that extra power connector on it the technically optional one but if they get rid of it and just run the 10 pin it is actually much more compact which could be useful and then SATA power comes from the motherboard which makes K management worse so that's your recap thanks for watching now you're all fully caught up to speed on 12 vo you can check our previous content on it if you want to learn just about the specs but they've changed a little bit over the last couple years so we wanted to revisit it especially now that we have new parts you go to store. Gamers nexus.net to grab a shirt like this one to support us directly or patreon.com Gamers Nexis thanks for watching we'll see you all next timethe power supply spec that we use in basically every computer these days is from 1995 at least for the cabling and there's been some effort to move over to ATX 12 vo which is this one this 10 pin does pretty close to the same thing functionally as the old 24 pin but it's really been slow to pick up even though Intel wrote the spec for both of these and it wrote the 12 V spec some time ago Intel's vision for the future along with a lot of the industry is a future where the power supply only does 12 volts or 12 vo 12 volts only as opposed to everything else that a standard today power supply in most PCS would use so 3.3 volts 5 volts -12 volts all of that goes away but it still has to be addressed because components still use it so all of it shifts to the motherboard this topic we've talked about a few times but now we finally have some components here like this 12 vo motherboard which if you're used to PC building with a 24 pin starts to look kind of crazy but today we're going to talk about whether this is going to become a reality and provide some stronger fundamentals on the basics of what this might mean for PC Building because again we've got stuff like this fsp 12 vo power supply there's a Corsair prototype well pretty close to final 12 vo on here we've got the MSI board and there's some stuff to talk about now before that this video is brought to you by lenoe cloud computing from aamai our web host provider that we've been using for over a decade now in our experience as a long-term customer of linode theyve reliable server Solutions and make server setup Easy by providing all kinds of first install scripts and launch points you can quickly build your own self-hosted VPN Game servers for csgo Minecraft and more by using their quick start guides and extremely detailed documentation we also have firsthand experience with their support team and can vouch for the quality even when all the mistakes were mine visit l ./ Gamers Nexus to get a $100 credit when you sign up today or click the link below so even though an atx2 volt only power supply doesn't provide the other voltages the PC still needs them it needs them for things like for example pcie where this pcie Riser we've actually split out the different voltage rails on this that's for monitoring specifically for our testing where there's 12vt lines that are split apart we've got 3.3 and we've got 5vt lines and each of these sort of clusters of wires is a different voltage for the most part and that's something that still has to be provided for the computer it's just not done by the power sply anymore and that means it moves to the motherboard where under the atx2 vo standard and specification all of those other voltages are handled here so there have to be dedicated vrms where you see clusters like this or over here that may handle uh the other voltage conversions even these small four pin connectors on the board that's for a cable something like this for SATA where SATA ssds are not 12v and so you now move this cable from the power supply where it is typically with 12vt ATX 12v uh to the motherboard gets kind of weird but that's how they're doing it it feels more like an oem system another couple examples too of things that aren't 12vt only a lot of LEDs involve 5volt headers uh op drives is another example that's less common these days and if we look at like the modm as well not intended as a plug but it's certainly uh is useful for this and you can grab one in store. Gamers access.net so I'll plug it anyway but you see like a Molex connector here on the mat with pin out has 5 volts the old 24 pin it's got 5 volts these three here we've got minus1 12 there's a 3.3 and uh then for RGB connections some of those are 5 volts also but a lot of other stuff is 12 volts already so it's not too big of a jump for the CPU or for the GPU it's actually not a jump at all so we have an existing article and video on the topic if you want a deep dive of what the spec is exactly but for the basics this becomes a loop where you either convert those voltages on the board or in the power supply so shifting it between one or the other feels like it's sort of a pointless shering of responsibility by the power supply and pushing it onto the board vendors but moving these conversion to the board is according to Intel better for lower overall power draw when the PC is in a low power state or especially in standby mode and if you think of a small overall uplift in standby multiplied across hundreds of computers in an office building or maybe tens of millions of computers in large metropolitan areas it actually does start to add up pretty fast so where these small efficiency benefits for a single consumer are functionally irrelevant won't really change how much you pay in power bills uh certainly it's more wasteful to just get rid of your current good power supply and swap it only because of a spec change although you can do adapters that we'll talk about but where it's irrelevant there it is actually useful at a large scale so there's some sense to it and coming back to that topic one of the early concerns we saw from our audience from you all with 12v was that it would potentially nullify perfectly good power supplies high-end stuff or anything that may have another decade of life as long as the cables don't change suddenly become suspect as to whether you can continue using it if 12v over catches on but it hasn't yet it's been years now and it hasn't gotten anywhere it's just the furthest we've gone is like one random oneoff motherboard from MSI with no vrm heat sinks and a couple of power supplies out there so it's not like a fast moving change but when or if it ever does switch over tables like this are what will resolve it where uh you can potentially adapt to existing power supplies or convert a 24 pin into a 10 pin 12 vo connector so since atx12v power supplies already make 12 volts it would be possible theoretically to use one to power an ATX 12 motherboard except for one problem which is standby voltage in traditional power supplies there's a separate 5volt rail called 5 volts standby or 5 vsb in 12v that's replaced by 12 V USB even with a custom pinned cable that one change actually makes the two standards functionally incompatible unless you also convert the 5 vsb to 12 vsb and corser has this adapter cable for doing exactly that there are a lot of empty pins on the power supply side of the cable that correspond to all the voltages that atx2 drops and some grounds this goes from any type four pin out Corsair power supply with the company's standard 18 pin and 10 pin motherboard connectors to an ATX 12 vo 10 pin motherboard connector there's actually an inline circuit in these and we're going to cut this one open to see what actually it looks like so here's the inline converter and that's what's doing all the really important lifting of just converting 5sb to 12 VB so that the computer can actually function and we'll take the uh cheap be quiet knife that they sent us to cut open the corser cable and check it out so there's some heat shrink uh on the PCB all right okay so there's the PCB it's actually kind of a lot going on in here I mean this is a large chunk to just include in line nothing really on the back side except for the solder joints and on the top side uh there's an fairly large inductor there's some filtering capacitors and if we get a closeup you'll see that up top with the purple sleeving near the inductor there's labeling for 5vt standby there's an accompanying ground next to it and then the yellow line is 12 volts and then the other side with the purple sleeving it's 12vt standby and then ground for the accompanying wire so this is in fact where the conversion is happening and this is what allows you to make a 12volt power supply basically turned into 12v kind of basically this is the answer to the concern of if boards start to go for 10 pins and 12 vo but people don't want to replace their perfectly good 10year warranty power supplies that's how you kind of bridge the gap uh ideally this ends up closer to the power supply be better for cable management but otherwise uh despite being bulky it's a solution so to give you a preview in case this ever takes off for the PC DIY scene of what this standard looks like we have three power supplies here we have a very small small form factor fsp power supply this is 12 vo and actually we'll just do a quick zoom in on the label here normally these labels are filled with all kinds of information for the other voltages but it's pretty simple you've got 12vt standby and 12 volts that's it so this is one now these are not to be confused with the sort of impostor 12 vo power supplies you see in prebuilt where Dell and HP uh for their consumer Division A lot of times they'll take their server power supplies that are only 12 volts but are not 12 Vo confusingly and so you end up with that 10 pin connector but it's pinned differently and uh it might not even fit at all because the actual keying of the connector is different next power supp we have is this corser unit and this is an rm850 but you can see that it is a pvt sample we'll talk about that in a second so this is an 850 W power supply we have another one here this is also an rm850 and uh it is not marked as a pvt sample and you can see the PBT came in this not retail product box so let's get started with these the only obvious differences between them aside from the stickers and the printing are the main motherboard connector and the type of 12pin pcie cable and header this unit without a printed sticker is handm marked as a production validation test unit or pvt this is basically the last step before the retail product and all features should match retail it has a 10 pin motherboard connector as you would expect and a pcie power cable with a microfit 12 pin like what's used on the RTX 30 series Fe cards the power supply side terminates into a regularized mini fit 12 pin otherwise this looks like a normal power supply the unit with a printed sticker actually has real packaging but it lacks printing around the connectors it has an access hole for adjusting what's probably a variable resistor but we're not sure exactly what function it serves instead of having a 10 pin on the power supply side this one has a 12 pin for the motherboard cable we don't know why CER chose to do it this way but on the board side of the cable there are two wires doubled up on pin two and pin six or ground and power okay respectively this power supply has a newer 12 plus 4 pin 12vt high power cable and it terminates into a 16 pin on the power supply it's interesting to see since we know that qusair ultimately decided to do this as two standard eight pins instead it's likely both Solutions are adequate but doing two separate eight pins allows Corsair to keep wider compatibility it also came with this clearly custom cable on the power supply side it goes into the main motherboard 12 pin header but the motherboard side is a 24 pin it's just missing a lot of those pins we traced this out and it's missing the 5vt and the 3.3 volt that would normally be in an atx1 12vt non 24 pin and this is a 12v power supply so that makes sense we think this might have been for a custom test board especially since it's got these probe points connected to the back side of two terminals also the yellow wire is tagged as I PSU which is a new signaling pin added to the ATX 12 standard and the last 12v only power supply that we have right now is this tiny fsp sfx unit so this is the one that is rated for 750 wats Max and on the power supply side the motherboard connector is a 12 pin right there uh and there's no dedicated 12vt high power on this one it's pretty simple this makes sense for a mini it X build um but otherwise there's really not a lot of cabling on it not a lot of features not a lot of pcie connectivity it's a pretty basic power supply that clearly the main point is small that's kind of it this is where we get into some of the confusing sort of wannabe standards where clearly on the 12 vo spec it takes a lot less room the surface area generally speaking of the 10 pin is much smaller they've got a six over here still smaller and that's kind of somewhat optional but uh we'll talk about that in a minute so much smaller footprint and a lot fewer wires to deal with in the cable itself of course but because 10 pin connections exist again and OEM builds from companies like dnhp you have to be careful about mixing and matching those because if the key in happens to be the same or you force it to fit which is basically always a bad sign with the power cable uh you could definitely end up killing components because you might be Crossing 12 volts to ground or something like like that if it even is 12 vo the power supply you're pulling from an oem system it just happens to have a 10 pin so you have to be careful about that already being kind of on the market but not being the 12o spec it's very confusing that way so back to the 24 pin standard this is again the pin out for it and you can see this only has uh two 12 volts right here and it's got all the required voltages for the PC so five and everything else that you lack in 12v but with only two 12vt connectors this can technically only provide up to 192 watt of 12 volts assuming the power supply and the cables can do 8 amps per pin and considering the most power hungry things in computers uh run mostly 12 volts that's not a lot of power but the main difference here is those power hungry things are either going to be fed their power through multiple or one of these eight pins with the CPU so is different cable entirely or through the pcie cable for the GPU but the new 10 pin 12v connector can handle a lot more power to the board directly which opens up some interesting possibilities as long as the rest of the computer's designed around it so here's that pin out for 12v it's got none of those other voltages and it has one more 12vt connection than the 24 pin making up for a total of 288 watts of 12vt power aside from that pin one is for turning the power supply on pin six is for power okay and pin 7 is the 12 vsb that replaced 5 vsb Pin 5 calls for its own discussion though so pin five is pretty interesting it's new to the 12v spec and it's required going forward it's specifically for iore PSU percent and as for what that means the spec defines it as this quote ipsu per is a signal coming from the power supply that reports the proportionality of power being delivered by the 12vt DC rail with the output load rating of the power supply this is represent presented as a unitless percentage of the total capacity using a current mode if multiple 12vt DC rails are implemented for example 12 vol1 DC and 12 vol2 DC then ipsu perc must report the utilization ratio of the combined total capacity so to distill the spec jargon basically uh this is to allow for brief overpower conditions to be reported back so it's a useful function it's actually kind of helpful and good for the the PC in general but ironically the ipsu percent signal is sent out as a 3.3 volt signal despite being 12 vo otherwise for the power supply and it sends the that signal to the motherboard in 10 Micro amp uh steps which then uh maps to 1% utilization per step on a scale of 0 to 200% for total power utilization of uh of the system so again you get back to brief overpower situations being reported that doesn't mean that all atx2 vo power supplies are required to deliver up to 200% of rated capacity it's just the reporting range in our own power supply reviews in the past we've seen that they run closer to 130 to 134% prior to overpower protection extremely short power excursions of up to 110 microc at 200% capacity are required on power supplies of 450 Watts or greater capacity per this spec and using the ipsu perc signal allows for reduced power Excursion require IR m in the power supply the intent is for the PC to be able to use the signal as a sign that it needs to quickly Throttle Down in order to not hurt the power supply or shut down due to tripping the psu's over current or overpower protection you don't want to run outside of the power supply as performance envelope regardless but overpower situations typically the way they work right now in atx2 volts is either you trip over current protection maybe you trip over Power Protection but if there's anything uh that triggers when you go overpower it's going to be one of those protections maybe the GPU is pulling too much current specifically or the whole system is but either way the result is it's off and that's how it works with this ipsu percent thing theoretically the system will be able to throttle on Power and be able to keep itself online or prevent some kind of massive failure uh if the power supply is otherwise typically insufficient in order to protect the components on the other side so that's where this is beneficial and if this becomes more popular and interesting enough it's possible that there's an ATX 12vt specification revision where they go to a new version and they add ipsu percent to a more Standard 24 pin layout power supply uh which could con cause a ton of confusion in the market if people suddenly have their systems throttling performance and they don't know why might be because they're going overpow maybe they spec him properly and they're pulling an extra 100 Watts Beyond what's intended something like that will cause rather than just a hard shutdown a new type of throttling it might be misconstrued as thermal throttling or something to that effect there is one other way that power supplies handle going over power and it's a different type of protection it looks something like this but the new approach is more graceful than the power supply exploding although much less interesting from a footage and future meming standpoint so this is what real ATX 12v motherboard looks like this is the MSI Pro h610 m2v this is one of the only ones on the market right now there's no vrm heat syncs it's h610 so can't overclock or anything like that uh and as for the power pin out it's the part that actually matters we detailed it earlier but you can see how much smaller the footprint is technically if the board is low power enough this one this 10 pin is all it needs to have to meet the spec and to turn on the extra six here is not required so this six pin Intel in the spec calls this the extra board connector and it's required on ATX 12 vo power supplies again like this that are over 450 wats and the six pin can be put on anything motherboard wise that needs to hit more than the 288 watt limit of this connector so that's what gets you the extra overhead now these connectors the only reason they'd really be under any power strain is if you had a lot of pcie slots where each full slot is limited to about 75 Watts or 12 Vol only it's TP typically 66 Watts for the 12vt spec and then the other uh nine or so comes from the other rails so the six pin on this it's physically and electrically identical to a standard PCI E6 pin that you would find powering your video card nothing new there and additionally this in itself isn't really new either because you'll find auxiliary power connectors on motherboards typically for overclocking so the high-end boards where they expect you might run multi-gpu this is more true from ages past those will have uh either a Molex or better case a pcie connector somewhere along the bottom or this the right Edge for additional power specifically so the 24 pin doesn't melt if the PCI slots are pulling Excess power that the two 12s can't handle past the 192 Watts or so uh depending on the gauge of the wire and stuff like that so that's all somewhat familiar the last cable or pin out on here that's relevant is that EPS 12 volts standard eight pin or 2x4 uh I guess technically you do one for and that's identical to the existing EPS 12 volt so nothing new there so those three inputs together can supply 960 Watts straight into the board which is way more than enough power for anything realistic to be built and we think in general that extra six pin is not going to be technically necessary but you're going to see it on a lot of boards if ATX 12 ever gets used if they're on the higher end side in the same way you might see two eight pins for EPS 12 volt even though you probably only need one it's just it starts to become associated with the higher end product but that's how it works so 960 WTS capacity and with the EPS 12vt still handling the CPU or the bulk of it that leaves the 10 and possibly the six handling everything else which really isn't much because you're basically talking about memory which in general is not that much power uh maybe something like some of these onboard ic's and components but for the most part maybe LEDs things that aren't going to really be pulling anything close to a CPU or a GPU which are handled more or less by discrete connectors at this point so uh even if you had all 75 Watts going to each PCI slot in an instance like this you're still left with 500 watts of overhead which is more than sufficient you could comfortably subtract the additional six pins contribution also and still be left with over 200 watts of Headroom so if the board has the extra connector there's no real reason to leave it unplugged but it does work without it we just question why it's being included on a board like this one that's not going to pull that much power in any reasonable scenario we talked to MSI and asked if there's any reason to use all three and the company had this to say quote Intel doesn't mention why EPS 12 Vol 8 Pin is kept but we think it might be because of protection CPU is the most power demanding it's safer to apply protection such as overcurrent independently for CPU and other components and on the topic of the additional pin MSI also said this quote for example a desktop PC not DIY or notebook is designed for office use and doesn't require big Power a 10 pin connector is enough in this scenario but for a board maker we can't know how consumers will use the pro h610 M 12 what devices will we put on the board so we offer the extra six pin now we understand the play it safe mentality here that's generally the sort of safer way to go obviously but it does sort of defeat some of the purpose of reducing the footprint of the atx12v non o spec so typical you probably throw the connector on the board to make it look more appealing to users who don't necessarily know what they're looking at they see this one has 10 plus 6 this one has 10 they buy the one with 10 plus 6 even though they're going to socket something into an h610 board that will never need it and as for after the 12 volts gets converted uh it then distributes the power wherever it needs to go so in the case of SATA for example we end up with the connector we mentioned ear earlier that actually just plugs into this really tiny spot right here and this actually maybe arguably becomes a worse situation for cable management uh there's probably going to be cleaner ways to do this but that is how you would plug in your 2 and 1 half in SSD today although nvme is taking off in such a way that a lot of people are eliminating that cable entirely but those four pin SATA connectors they use a four pin version of the same microfit terminals as the pcie 12vt high power connector making them fairly tidy for the board this four pin is officially rated for two SATA drives and there's also a six pin version rated for four we'd prefer to see them moved down near the actual SATA headers because that would make more sense for cable management but that's going to be a board level decision those are really the only significant differences between this atx2 vo board and a standard ATX 12vt board otherwise everything else is normal now these changes do move some of the cost away from power supplies into the motherboard so where the power supply might sort of like for like get a little bit cheaper because the conversion is not being done there anymore you as a consumer are still going to pay for it and they're going to make sure of that and honestly if the cost vanished entirely they'd probably still make sure you pay for it because why would they why would they stop collecting margin on something even if it no longer has part of the product but in this case it's absorbed by the motherboard because it now has additional features it needs to accommodate we talked to MSI about this MSI said quote the cost increase of 12vt to 5 volt and 12vt to 3.3 volt circuits is not much so that's the good news they said most of the cost is added from bigger PCB size and more layers to accommodate 12vt to 5vt and 12vt to 3.3 volt circuits and components for ATX boards the cost is close to non2 vo since it doesn't require bigger PCB size and more PCB layers but for microatx it needs a larger microatx PCB and six layer PCB compared to four layers being enough for a non2 vo board it might cost up to 24% more mostly from increased PCB size and two more PCB layers 24% more is a lot because from a manufacturer perspective they're not going to charge you 24% more because they paid 24% more they're going to charge you probably about double of what the cost increase actually was that's just how the margin typically works for this stuff so it's not an insignificant change now the only thing positively going for us here is that with the Advent of ddr5 and pcie Gen 5 typically most of these boards are moving away from four layers any anyway because the signal Integrity just isn't there on a four- layer board they need the additional layers for signaling anyway and so a lot of that cost is sort of absorbed in a change that they've already had to make so as quickly as possible then atx2 has better power efficiency in low power States or extremely low power States when it's like a couple Watts for total system draw that is irrelevant for an individual but multiply it across millions or hundreds of millions of PCS if suddenly like a flip of a switch everybody moved to a higher efficiency atx2 power supply uh assuming no cost for getting rid of the old stuff that would be a more environmentally conscious or power efficient direction to move which in terms of reducing the impact to the grid because remember a lot of these changes in Spec come not only from Intel but from government level or federal level contacts sometimes state level in California uh where they are looking at how do we reduce the draw the load on the actual power grid that's where a lot of this stuff comes from so um obviously there are sort of caveats of well if we just instantly invalidate all of these perfectly good power supplies it's probably actually worse to then have to buy an entirely new product to do the same thing with slightly better power efficiency but we're not going to get into that discussion today uh there are ways to adapt an existing power supply if you found yourself in possession of a 12v board that doesn't have a 12v non o counterpart it's just they're kind of the cables where you end up with you know this is just the heat shrink for it but uh a PCB the size in the instance of the test one that corser made in order to do the 12 vsb adapter so uh ipsu percent signaling is probably the most interesting aspect here that could theoretically be extracted and applied to a standard 12vt power supply not 12 vo and be useful for power throttling in instances where you're hitting over Power Protection rather than just just turning off or exploding the ladder of which is much less desirable although more interesting uh it's questionable if board makers will push the change for DIY there's lots of Industry inertia in the existing ecosystem the existing spec and they're not likely to just switch so you don't need to worry about just suddenly your power supply isn't going to work anymore and you have to buy an adapter cable probably this is going to take a very long time you're more likely to see this in OEM systems and pre-builts at a large level like Dell and HP where they build their own motherboard assuming they don't also just repin a power supply so uh for ATX size boards six plus layer Enthusiast stuff pricing is not really going to change from what we understand for smaller boards the pricing will go up uh because they have to add those extra layers and board space used is about the same if they have that extra power connector on it the technically optional one but if they get rid of it and just run the 10 pin it is actually much more compact which could be useful and then SATA power comes from the motherboard which makes K management worse so that's your recap thanks for watching now you're all fully caught up to speed on 12 vo you can check our previous content on it if you want to learn just about the specs but they've changed a little bit over the last couple years so we wanted to revisit it especially now that we have new parts you go to store. Gamers nexus.net to grab a shirt like this one to support us directly or patreon.com Gamers Nexis thanks for watching we'll see you all next time\n"