The Art of Repairing and Upcycling Used Power Supplies: A Behind-the-Scenes Look

As I embarked on this project, I felt a sense of nervousness wash over me. I had always been hesitant to dive into repairing used power supplies, fearing that they might be beyond repair or pose a risk to my equipment. However, as I began to disassemble the power supply and inspect its components, I realized that many of these units were still in good working condition, with only minor issues requiring attention. The process of repairing and upcycling used power supplies may seem daunting at first, but with the right tools and a bit of patience, it can be a highly rewarding experience.

One of the most significant challenges when working with used power supplies is identifying which components are still functional and which ones require replacement. This is where the use of a voltage meter comes in handy. By carefully measuring the voltage output from each component, I was able to determine which sections of the power supply were functioning properly and which ones needed attention. In this particular example, the 24-pin motherboard connector proved to be a tricky component, as it seemed to be spitting out weird voltages on my voltmeter. Despite my best efforts, I was unable to get it to function reliably, and so I decided to move on to the next step in the process.

The next step involved testing the power supply's ability to handle electrical stress without causing damage to itself or surrounding components. To do this, I used a simple yet effective method known as the "crappy build test." This involves building a makeshift system using discarded parts and materials, with the goal of simulating real-world usage patterns. In this case, I was able to find an old, discarded motherboard that would serve perfectly for this purpose. By applying gentle stress to the power supply, I was able to determine whether it could handle increased load without overheating or failing catastrophically.

In many cases, using a used power supply can be a cost-effective solution, especially when compared to purchasing a brand-new unit. However, this approach often requires some creativity and resourcefulness on the part of the user. In this particular example, I was able to purchase a used power supply for $250 Australian dollars, which represents an incredible value considering its high-powered capabilities. By repairing and upcycling this power supply, I was able to breathe new life into it and use it in future builds without breaking the bank.

One of the most satisfying aspects of working with used power supplies is the sense of accomplishment that comes from taking a discarded unit and transforming it into something useful once again. For me, there's no greater joy than scouring thrift stores, online marketplaces, or even my own junkyard for hidden gems waiting to be restored to their former glory. Over time, I've developed a keen eye for spotting potential in these units, often finding them to be more reliable and efficient than their brand-new counterparts.

As I continued to work with the power supply, I began to appreciate the importance of taking the necessary precautions when working with electrical components. This includes always turning off power sources immediately if smoke or unusual odors are detected, as well as taking steps to protect oneself from potential electrical shocks. While these risks can be minimized by exercising caution and following proper safety protocols, they should never be ignored.

In conclusion, repairing and upcycling used power supplies is a rewarding experience that requires patience, creativity, and attention to detail. By taking the time to inspect components carefully and test their functionality thoroughly, users can breathe new life into discarded units and give them a second chance at serving their purpose. Whether you're looking to save money or simply reduce electronic waste, this approach can be a valuable skill to have in your toolkit – and one that I'm happy to share with you through my ongoing endeavors in the world of PC parts repair and reuse.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enin our recent used PC parts hunt of the month we picked up a heap of different high-end power supplies and in total I got 11 power supplies for $250 Aussie dolls and four of those were absolutely fine I didn't have to do anything with them one of them was like some Bitcoin power supply with not even having a 24 pin or anything on it but then six of them were coair power supplies and they included no cables now the first thing with this was why did the person not sell the cables with them when I met him I pretty much figured out why he had a newborn things were pretty tense in the house one can only imagine what happens to those cables they simply get chucked in the rubbish bin but there was a lot of comments in that Parts hunt and so the most up verted comment in that video did make me step back and say yeah I'm probably being too Blas when I talk about use power supplies and especially using different cables because I did see a few comments that I really disagree with one of the comments for instance you just throw all these power suppliers in the bin they're worthless comments like these I mean we've got here if I was to buy just these power supplies alone the six Corsair ones brand new from the store it would set me back $1,400 Australian dollars and over the years I've been saving these cables because I come into modular power supplies that either only include say the 24 pin and the CPU pin and they're either semi modular or they just include no cables at all like these ones right here and so I like to get the power supplies up and running again and fully functional especially when we run them through the power supply tester and everything is coming back okay though the final thing is I do like to copy the saying from the Japanese Yahoo auctions and that is if you're nervous too and you're really nervous about this thing don't do it it's that simple but if you're like me you're like let's just give it a crack see what value we can extract then we're going to go through the tools that you are going to need the first is the voltmeter this is probably the most important thing when dealing with different cables and different power supplies now the second thing is a power supply tester this is before you even touch any of your components always run things through a power supply tester because if something is off this is just going to switch off or the power supply itself is going to switch off and if it doesn't switch off and it blows up well then that's a pretty bad power supply and it doesn't have the proper safety circuits in and if that happens then you just actually in hedly saved yourself a massive headache though the final test that we're going through here just to make sure this HX 1200 is okay that is to hook it up to this old potato right here for the GPU we've got a GTX 555 for the hard drive got an 80 GB hard drive then for the whole system it's a q9400 and what we're going to do here is just hook it up get a signal in the Bios check that the hard drives there and then I'll know that this power supply is good to go and anyhow with all that aside let's get these six power supplies or at least until I run out of cables as many power supplies working as possible right after today's video sponsor if you want to get rid of this annoying activate Windows message then today's video sponsor SCD Keys has you covered for as little as $15 US after you enter that coupon code bftc you can cop yourself a legit single end user license today also works for Windows 11 Pro too links in the description below welcome back to Tech yes City and we are going to start now by testing out our cables connected to the hx1200 so I've got all the cables that I believe should work okay however we have to double check and make sure actually in this case we're going to be triple checking and even after that quadruple checking because we're going to first off use the voltmeter then we're going to as we said in the intro use the power supply tester then we're going to connect it to a dumpster build just to check that everything's okay now what you're going to need to get this power supply to initiate its power and turn on like it normally would in a build is one of these right here they're 24 pin and they got inside two pins to short the power supply and make it so that it boots Up Normally and then the voltages will then be live on your wires which you can then use a voltmeter to start probing those wires and checking the voltages now most voltmeters will all have similar settings there might be digital ones nowadays I wouldn't no I just use this one we've had for ages at my place and this one will give you out essentially readings in different uh quadrants but we've set it to the 0 to 20 volt readings so it'll pick up voltages between that ranges and then it'll tell you if you probe the negative to where the negative supposed to be and the positive to where that's supposed to be you should be getting the voltage that you're looking for essentially and so what we're going to do now is turn this uh voltage reader on and and then we're going to start probing all these wires that we've connected to this PowerPlay individually just to make sure they're checking out and now if we know these proper pinouts of these wires and where they should terminate then we should be able to get the right readings so first of all let's start off with the eight pin and for this one right here I'll put the diagram up on the screen for you if we're looking at this face on like we are on the camera right now we should have the bottom four pins are negative and the top four pins should be positive 12v and so let's get on to quickly testing this out right now and make sure that this is all okay so that cpu8 pin is giving out the correct readings it's now time to move on to the PCI 6 or 8 Pin depending on which configuration you use nowadays most graphics cards just use the 8 Pin and so what we got right here is these two pins that are disconnectable they should be negative then for the remaining six pins and I'll throw up a diagram again the bottom three should be positive 12v and the top three should be your negative so let's get on to testing out I've actually got to test out two different ones of these cables because we're using a much higher power power supp play I want to be able to when I get this working properly use this with a high-end graphics card so let's get through testing two lots of these PCA 8 Pin so that ended up checking out absolutely fine but the last two wires we are going to go over here are actually a bit more trickier because they introduce new voltages and we'll start off with the Molex because that's got one less voltage to deal with than the Seda and if we look at this front on the left hand sh uh and if we look at this connector front on when we're probing these connectors the left hand side should be the 12volt the middle two should be the negative then the right hand side should be the 5V so let's quickly get on to testing our mlex connector make sure it's okay then we'll get back to the SATA which can definitely be the most trickiest of these modular connectors so double-checking that molx connector that worked absolutely fine but next up we're going to go here with the SATA connector and you might be thinking well how do you probe this thing because it splits off into actually more terminations inside the connection than are being connected to the actual connector itself so what we're going to be looking at here is this bottom bit right here and I'll show you if we're looking at it front on and the L is facing the left hand side then our middle voltage should be 5V our left hand side should be 3.3 and then second from the left and second from the right should be negative and then the right hand side should be 12v positive and so how we're going to test this is we actually have a little room in here most SATA connectors should have a little bit of room right in here and then we can actually just just quickly put our probe in there and get the correct voltages and now we've checked all those cables out it's time to hook this up to the power supply tester and just make sure everything's okay so if we hook up all cables up properly these three lights on the left hand side here they should all light up green and also the voltages on the screen here should give out the correct readings within 5% minus or plus tolerance in other words the 12vt line should read 11.4 to 12.6 5V line that should read 4.75 to 5.25 and then the 3.3 should read 3.15 to 3.45 power good should also generally be reading between 200 and 400 any less it means the power supply is on its way to to be dead any higher it could mean that something is really unstable in the power supply and it's also shouldn't be used there the final Tesla we're going through here just to make sure this hx200 is okay that is to hook it up to this old potato right here for the GPU we've got a GTX 555 for the hard drive got an 80 GB hard drive then for the whole system it's a q9400 and what we're going to do here is just hook it up get a signal in the Bios check that the hard drives there and then I'll know that this power supply is good to go so our first power supply is now booting up and everything's connected we've even hooked up a Molex fan the hard drive I can feel Motion in it and it's not smoking up so that's pretty much fine there then the graphic card of course giving out a signal with the operating system not found everything here is working fine I think we've now got one of six power supplies kitted out with the cables ready to go let's move through the rest of these power supplies the other five and I'm hoping I actually come into not having enough uh seder or Molex connectors cuz I do want to show you guys what I do in that scenario when I don't have matching mlex or SATA connectors but also there's another tip that I'll show you because we'll start on this rmx RM 550x right now because I'm going to show you guys how I also piece out things so we got the rm5 50x here it is now all connected with the voltages where they should be however you'll notice uh during testing I did come into a few Molex connectors I had here that were showing bizarre readings not where they should be so towards the end of the video when I start running out of Molex connectors I'll show you guys what you can do in this scenario but also you'll notice that I've got a bit of a mixed dish here and that's because this is the cheapest power supply of the bunch so I'm just using sort of whatever I can that works properly on the this cheaper unit so we're now just testing out our final power supply even though there's another two in the background there I simply don't have enough motherboard connectors available I only had four but even then I actually came into a problem and something that I learned here today and that is not all of these motherboard connectors here are the same in fact these motherboard connectors this one here I plugged it up and put in my uh two pin Auto motherboard uh short pin to start the power supply up and it wouldn't start the power supply up and because it doesn't have any type three or type four markings on it I believe this is from a different manufacturer even though they just pretty much copied the same uh outlay as Corsair used here or I don't know I don't know power supp history maybe Corsair copied it off someone else but it's basically not the same wiring as the ones that fit the Corsair cable the type 3s and so this one here I will have to order not just another two for the ones that I don't have in the background but I'll also have to order an additional one because I'm not going to use this one simply because it is too complex there's just too many pins to reroute here it'll take me so much time and it's just not worth it when I can buy these off AliExpress for about $9 and I think 60 cents shipped so we're going to finish off this last power supp though everything else is checked out fine where we're ready for the final uh test on this power supply but I want to show you guys we'll just run through the test quickly make sure it passes the PC test and everything boots up fine but then I'm going to show you guys if you run out of uh Sedar or MX connectors what to do in that case so now we finished up this final power supply but what if we come into a situation where we don't have enough seder or Molex connectors and we need to get something working quick say we've got a a flip later on that day a PC sale or you just need to get something and you can't wait to order in a replacement cable off the internet or you just want to save a few bucks well this is where on CPU and PCI cables I do not recommend it and I've spoken to power supply guys over in Taiwan about this and they said yeah do not like reattach and sold the wires on those because they're high powered components but for Sedar and Molex as long as you do a good job it should be fine and so here's where if you look at the back of these connectors you'll see they've got a different pin out so the pins are actually in a different spot and this is the one that works with the Corsair power supplies without me changing anything this is just a random one that will actually fit the socket on the back of the power supply but it's reading out the incorrect voltages and so this is where we are going to start uh rearranging the wires to where they need to go so we can then have a Molex connector or or a SATA connector that then Works absolutely fine now for the motherboard cable just like like we said before as well I also don't bother with that because it's just too complicated there's too many wires especially when the cables are all black I'm just going to lose my head trying to figure out where things could go it just gets pretty complicated but because there's only four wires here it should be relatively easy to figure out so let's give it a tackle so now we've got the final piece of the puzzle right we' got this Molex connector here we are going to connect it up where it should be and straight away when we test out the 12vt it's giving out a read reading of 7vt so what that means is uh this is actually this middle one here is a 5V because it's going through the negative it's minus 5 that equals 7 Vols and we test out this one it's the same deal 7 volt so these two middle wires are 5V and this N1 here is negative and it looks like the positive is where it should be so basically what we got is we got an extra 5vt line instead of a negative and they're in the Middle where the negative should be so we've got to basically switch these two 5 volts or basically disconnect one of them and then wire in and switch the negative to the middle and also then switch the 5vt to this outer right hand side here and we should have a fully working mlex connector so let's get into that right now so we now just finished our uh power supply this is the one that we've rewired so we Chang the two 5 volts and we've connected that to the outside where it needs to go then the the one negative is just connected to those two negatives and that will flow through to the other two connectors because we solded that to the first connector here so all we have to do now is tape this up and then test it out all righty Let's test out this sweet new connector that we just have made for ourselves here 12 volts where it should be and 12 volts where it should be and the 5 Vols where it should be so let's just check this out on a build now so let's Here's the final test there's our fan booting up you might have heard that hard drive kicking in that's working absolutely fine so we've just connected you notice here just using this Molex to a SATA converter and you're like what how does that work well it's actually 3.3 Vol I find find in modern gaming PCs and any really any PC I use I I just never really need a 3.3 volt so even if I come into a SATA connector that I need to wire up to a power supply I'll usually just uh cut the 3.3 volt and just leave it off the connector anyhow so you can get around that so cuz the Molex is a lot like it's got one less wire it's just simpler to test and easier to uh navigate and so in this case yeah you can just leave your 3.3 volt off and your hard drive drives and you say the drives they're all going to work fine but you probably come to this stage and you're like Brian what happens what happens if I use the wrong connector well here's where we're actually going to get that 80 gb drive and we're going to cook we're going to we're just going to cook it let's just cook it I tell you what these old drives these 80 gb like I'm just waiting it's getting really hot here I'm just waiting for like more smoke to come out but the old school stuff they make it so sturdy that yeah that was just undramatic so this here is getting really hot so yeah that's all just a little bit of smoke came out of that one it was actually undramatic now the final thing of course is to go over is the cables me personally I do not cut up 8 Pin pcie or 8 Pin CPU um cables because once you start soldering especially if you're like me and you're soldering mediocre at best you're losing Integrity in The Wire itself and so I only rewire the um Seda lines and the Molex lines and in fact I only do this first via the Molex because it's got such an easy pin out and it's so easy to uh correctly read the voltages with your volt meter and in saying that I don't have much experience with EVGA power supplies a lot of people in the comments we're talking about EVGA power supplies unfortunately in Australia they don't really sell EVGA power supplies they haven't really sold them in the past Corsair generally for the high-end power supplies here was one of the most popular brands the one really good thing about the Corsair power supplies if you guys didn't know this was they've got their system of mainly type 3 and type four power supply cables and these are actually interchangeable type 3 and type four can both fit the same power supplies except the 24 pin motherboard cable and that has an actual different layout and that actually won't fit the rear of the power supply if it's a type 3 that needs to fit a type four and vice versa so in other words you can't really it up if you've got Corsair type 3 and type four cables that you need to fit to Corsair power supplies and here we are guys with all that out of the way we are now at conclusion time with used power supplies that do not come included with cables now the most important thing you can have if you decide to pick up these power supplies like I did is firstly make sure you get them for a bargain secondly always have a voltage meter handy and that was something that I just I should have mentioned in that used power supply so um sorry that us PC parts on I thank you guys for pointing that out but then I felt like the replies in the comments to that comment was just just like a Pyon effect it's like oh someone's critiqued him for something he made a mistake and then it's just like throw the power supplies in the bin I'm not throwing $1,400 of power suppli in the bin especially when they all work perfectly fine but what we did here today is I wanted to show you guys some things that I do behind the scenes and I guess I've never I don't know if I've talked about this in the past I think I've done it in budget builds in the past with b-roll where I've rewired P plays on the Seder and the um MOX connectors and I've solded that in videos but at the same time I shouldn't assume that uh new viewers know what I've done in the past so again do apologize for not talking about that in these parts time but what we see here today is you can extract so much value out of these used power supplies it's something that I've been doing for a long time now and I'm going to keep doing it because as you saw here today I've just got to order a few more connectors those uh 24 pin motherboard connectors and then I'm good to go so in closing off just like we said in the intro if you're nervous about these kinds of things I probably wouldn't do it but if you are a little bit adventurous and you have say an old crappy build lying around and a voltage meter and you think you can tackle this then I I think you're going to extract a lot of value out of this uh one thing that did surprise me coming out of today's video was that 24 pin even though it connected perfectly into that PowerPlay it was actually a different um motherboard connector and the reason I knew that was CU it just was spitting out weird voltages on this voltmeter and so I'm not going to use that at all and then the next thing that we had was that crappy build that is invaluable because that is your final test to make sure you're getting a signal out your hard drive you can feel that spinning your fan is on Etc so I always recommend that as the final layer of protection now in the P play tester we did it on the first P play and then I just skipped it for the rest because we're using the same Corsair power supplies and I've already tested them in the partson I know they all work fine they're giving out good readings and the voltage levels are fine but I would do that three-step process voltage meter power supply tester and then a crappy build and then you're ready for the prime time after that though in saying that I hope you guys enjoyed today's video enjoyed going sort of behind the scenes with how I deal with used power supplies and just yeah the bargain that I got here I still think it one of the best deals I've got all year for $250 Aussie doll I've only got to spend another I think 45 Aussie doll to get the rest of the power supplies pieced out and I also got another four power supplies that were already good to go without any messing around and two of those I've already pieced out in builds flipped them and they're absolutely fine so in total we've got 10 working power supplies that are all really high powered power supplies for $295 Aussie which is incredibly good value because I can use those all in high in builds now and I don't have to go out and buy $150 power supplies or even in the case of a hx1200 a $300 power supply so awesome for me but if you disagree I can't help you you know I can't please you if you think differently but I'm just showing you the whole routine here today breaking it down and hopefully it helps someone out there if they've been wondering what to do with power supplies they come into and they don't have the connectors and that's why I just over time I just keep connectors from power supplies because a lot of people do sell modular power supplies without the cables and they do sell them very cheap anyhow guys with all that aside do let us know in the comments section below what's your experience with used power supplies especially used power supplies without modular cables also the final thing is if there is any unsuspected smoke or anything at normal just turn the power off straight away that's one thing you've always got to remember don't forget that anything's abnormal and you see smoke especially just turn turn everything off that's a that's the last thing I'll say before I get on out of you and I'll catch you in another takech video very soon love reading those thoughts and opinions as always please out for now byein our recent used PC parts hunt of the month we picked up a heap of different high-end power supplies and in total I got 11 power supplies for $250 Aussie dolls and four of those were absolutely fine I didn't have to do anything with them one of them was like some Bitcoin power supply with not even having a 24 pin or anything on it but then six of them were coair power supplies and they included no cables now the first thing with this was why did the person not sell the cables with them when I met him I pretty much figured out why he had a newborn things were pretty tense in the house one can only imagine what happens to those cables they simply get chucked in the rubbish bin but there was a lot of comments in that Parts hunt and so the most up verted comment in that video did make me step back and say yeah I'm probably being too Blas when I talk about use power supplies and especially using different cables because I did see a few comments that I really disagree with one of the comments for instance you just throw all these power suppliers in the bin they're worthless comments like these I mean we've got here if I was to buy just these power supplies alone the six Corsair ones brand new from the store it would set me back $1,400 Australian dollars and over the years I've been saving these cables because I come into modular power supplies that either only include say the 24 pin and the CPU pin and they're either semi modular or they just include no cables at all like these ones right here and so I like to get the power supplies up and running again and fully functional especially when we run them through the power supply tester and everything is coming back okay though the final thing is I do like to copy the saying from the Japanese Yahoo auctions and that is if you're nervous too and you're really nervous about this thing don't do it it's that simple but if you're like me you're like let's just give it a crack see what value we can extract then we're going to go through the tools that you are going to need the first is the voltmeter this is probably the most important thing when dealing with different cables and different power supplies now the second thing is a power supply tester this is before you even touch any of your components always run things through a power supply tester because if something is off this is just going to switch off or the power supply itself is going to switch off and if it doesn't switch off and it blows up well then that's a pretty bad power supply and it doesn't have the proper safety circuits in and if that happens then you just actually in hedly saved yourself a massive headache though the final test that we're going through here just to make sure this HX 1200 is okay that is to hook it up to this old potato right here for the GPU we've got a GTX 555 for the hard drive got an 80 GB hard drive then for the whole system it's a q9400 and what we're going to do here is just hook it up get a signal in the Bios check that the hard drives there and then I'll know that this power supply is good to go and anyhow with all that aside let's get these six power supplies or at least until I run out of cables as many power supplies working as possible right after today's video sponsor if you want to get rid of this annoying activate Windows message then today's video sponsor SCD Keys has you covered for as little as $15 US after you enter that coupon code bftc you can cop yourself a legit single end user license today also works for Windows 11 Pro too links in the description below welcome back to Tech yes City and we are going to start now by testing out our cables connected to the hx1200 so I've got all the cables that I believe should work okay however we have to double check and make sure actually in this case we're going to be triple checking and even after that quadruple checking because we're going to first off use the voltmeter then we're going to as we said in the intro use the power supply tester then we're going to connect it to a dumpster build just to check that everything's okay now what you're going to need to get this power supply to initiate its power and turn on like it normally would in a build is one of these right here they're 24 pin and they got inside two pins to short the power supply and make it so that it boots Up Normally and then the voltages will then be live on your wires which you can then use a voltmeter to start probing those wires and checking the voltages now most voltmeters will all have similar settings there might be digital ones nowadays I wouldn't no I just use this one we've had for ages at my place and this one will give you out essentially readings in different uh quadrants but we've set it to the 0 to 20 volt readings so it'll pick up voltages between that ranges and then it'll tell you if you probe the negative to where the negative supposed to be and the positive to where that's supposed to be you should be getting the voltage that you're looking for essentially and so what we're going to do now is turn this uh voltage reader on and and then we're going to start probing all these wires that we've connected to this PowerPlay individually just to make sure they're checking out and now if we know these proper pinouts of these wires and where they should terminate then we should be able to get the right readings so first of all let's start off with the eight pin and for this one right here I'll put the diagram up on the screen for you if we're looking at this face on like we are on the camera right now we should have the bottom four pins are negative and the top four pins should be positive 12v and so let's get on to quickly testing this out right now and make sure that this is all okay so that cpu8 pin is giving out the correct readings it's now time to move on to the PCI 6 or 8 Pin depending on which configuration you use nowadays most graphics cards just use the 8 Pin and so what we got right here is these two pins that are disconnectable they should be negative then for the remaining six pins and I'll throw up a diagram again the bottom three should be positive 12v and the top three should be your negative so let's get on to testing out I've actually got to test out two different ones of these cables because we're using a much higher power power supp play I want to be able to when I get this working properly use this with a high-end graphics card so let's get through testing two lots of these PCA 8 Pin so that ended up checking out absolutely fine but the last two wires we are going to go over here are actually a bit more trickier because they introduce new voltages and we'll start off with the Molex because that's got one less voltage to deal with than the Seda and if we look at this front on the left hand sh uh and if we look at this connector front on when we're probing these connectors the left hand side should be the 12volt the middle two should be the negative then the right hand side should be the 5V so let's quickly get on to testing our mlex connector make sure it's okay then we'll get back to the SATA which can definitely be the most trickiest of these modular connectors so double-checking that molx connector that worked absolutely fine but next up we're going to go here with the SATA connector and you might be thinking well how do you probe this thing because it splits off into actually more terminations inside the connection than are being connected to the actual connector itself so what we're going to be looking at here is this bottom bit right here and I'll show you if we're looking at it front on and the L is facing the left hand side then our middle voltage should be 5V our left hand side should be 3.3 and then second from the left and second from the right should be negative and then the right hand side should be 12v positive and so how we're going to test this is we actually have a little room in here most SATA connectors should have a little bit of room right in here and then we can actually just just quickly put our probe in there and get the correct voltages and now we've checked all those cables out it's time to hook this up to the power supply tester and just make sure everything's okay so if we hook up all cables up properly these three lights on the left hand side here they should all light up green and also the voltages on the screen here should give out the correct readings within 5% minus or plus tolerance in other words the 12vt line should read 11.4 to 12.6 5V line that should read 4.75 to 5.25 and then the 3.3 should read 3.15 to 3.45 power good should also generally be reading between 200 and 400 any less it means the power supply is on its way to to be dead any higher it could mean that something is really unstable in the power supply and it's also shouldn't be used there the final Tesla we're going through here just to make sure this hx200 is okay that is to hook it up to this old potato right here for the GPU we've got a GTX 555 for the hard drive got an 80 GB hard drive then for the whole system it's a q9400 and what we're going to do here is just hook it up get a signal in the Bios check that the hard drives there and then I'll know that this power supply is good to go so our first power supply is now booting up and everything's connected we've even hooked up a Molex fan the hard drive I can feel Motion in it and it's not smoking up so that's pretty much fine there then the graphic card of course giving out a signal with the operating system not found everything here is working fine I think we've now got one of six power supplies kitted out with the cables ready to go let's move through the rest of these power supplies the other five and I'm hoping I actually come into not having enough uh seder or Molex connectors cuz I do want to show you guys what I do in that scenario when I don't have matching mlex or SATA connectors but also there's another tip that I'll show you because we'll start on this rmx RM 550x right now because I'm going to show you guys how I also piece out things so we got the rm5 50x here it is now all connected with the voltages where they should be however you'll notice uh during testing I did come into a few Molex connectors I had here that were showing bizarre readings not where they should be so towards the end of the video when I start running out of Molex connectors I'll show you guys what you can do in this scenario but also you'll notice that I've got a bit of a mixed dish here and that's because this is the cheapest power supply of the bunch so I'm just using sort of whatever I can that works properly on the this cheaper unit so we're now just testing out our final power supply even though there's another two in the background there I simply don't have enough motherboard connectors available I only had four but even then I actually came into a problem and something that I learned here today and that is not all of these motherboard connectors here are the same in fact these motherboard connectors this one here I plugged it up and put in my uh two pin Auto motherboard uh short pin to start the power supply up and it wouldn't start the power supply up and because it doesn't have any type three or type four markings on it I believe this is from a different manufacturer even though they just pretty much copied the same uh outlay as Corsair used here or I don't know I don't know power supp history maybe Corsair copied it off someone else but it's basically not the same wiring as the ones that fit the Corsair cable the type 3s and so this one here I will have to order not just another two for the ones that I don't have in the background but I'll also have to order an additional one because I'm not going to use this one simply because it is too complex there's just too many pins to reroute here it'll take me so much time and it's just not worth it when I can buy these off AliExpress for about $9 and I think 60 cents shipped so we're going to finish off this last power supp though everything else is checked out fine where we're ready for the final uh test on this power supply but I want to show you guys we'll just run through the test quickly make sure it passes the PC test and everything boots up fine but then I'm going to show you guys if you run out of uh Sedar or MX connectors what to do in that case so now we finished up this final power supply but what if we come into a situation where we don't have enough seder or Molex connectors and we need to get something working quick say we've got a a flip later on that day a PC sale or you just need to get something and you can't wait to order in a replacement cable off the internet or you just want to save a few bucks well this is where on CPU and PCI cables I do not recommend it and I've spoken to power supply guys over in Taiwan about this and they said yeah do not like reattach and sold the wires on those because they're high powered components but for Sedar and Molex as long as you do a good job it should be fine and so here's where if you look at the back of these connectors you'll see they've got a different pin out so the pins are actually in a different spot and this is the one that works with the Corsair power supplies without me changing anything this is just a random one that will actually fit the socket on the back of the power supply but it's reading out the incorrect voltages and so this is where we are going to start uh rearranging the wires to where they need to go so we can then have a Molex connector or or a SATA connector that then Works absolutely fine now for the motherboard cable just like like we said before as well I also don't bother with that because it's just too complicated there's too many wires especially when the cables are all black I'm just going to lose my head trying to figure out where things could go it just gets pretty complicated but because there's only four wires here it should be relatively easy to figure out so let's give it a tackle so now we've got the final piece of the puzzle right we' got this Molex connector here we are going to connect it up where it should be and straight away when we test out the 12vt it's giving out a read reading of 7vt so what that means is uh this is actually this middle one here is a 5V because it's going through the negative it's minus 5 that equals 7 Vols and we test out this one it's the same deal 7 volt so these two middle wires are 5V and this N1 here is negative and it looks like the positive is where it should be so basically what we got is we got an extra 5vt line instead of a negative and they're in the Middle where the negative should be so we've got to basically switch these two 5 volts or basically disconnect one of them and then wire in and switch the negative to the middle and also then switch the 5vt to this outer right hand side here and we should have a fully working mlex connector so let's get into that right now so we now just finished our uh power supply this is the one that we've rewired so we Chang the two 5 volts and we've connected that to the outside where it needs to go then the the one negative is just connected to those two negatives and that will flow through to the other two connectors because we solded that to the first connector here so all we have to do now is tape this up and then test it out all righty Let's test out this sweet new connector that we just have made for ourselves here 12 volts where it should be and 12 volts where it should be and the 5 Vols where it should be so let's just check this out on a build now so let's Here's the final test there's our fan booting up you might have heard that hard drive kicking in that's working absolutely fine so we've just connected you notice here just using this Molex to a SATA converter and you're like what how does that work well it's actually 3.3 Vol I find find in modern gaming PCs and any really any PC I use I I just never really need a 3.3 volt so even if I come into a SATA connector that I need to wire up to a power supply I'll usually just uh cut the 3.3 volt and just leave it off the connector anyhow so you can get around that so cuz the Molex is a lot like it's got one less wire it's just simpler to test and easier to uh navigate and so in this case yeah you can just leave your 3.3 volt off and your hard drive drives and you say the drives they're all going to work fine but you probably come to this stage and you're like Brian what happens what happens if I use the wrong connector well here's where we're actually going to get that 80 gb drive and we're going to cook we're going to we're just going to cook it let's just cook it I tell you what these old drives these 80 gb like I'm just waiting it's getting really hot here I'm just waiting for like more smoke to come out but the old school stuff they make it so sturdy that yeah that was just undramatic so this here is getting really hot so yeah that's all just a little bit of smoke came out of that one it was actually undramatic now the final thing of course is to go over is the cables me personally I do not cut up 8 Pin pcie or 8 Pin CPU um cables because once you start soldering especially if you're like me and you're soldering mediocre at best you're losing Integrity in The Wire itself and so I only rewire the um Seda lines and the Molex lines and in fact I only do this first via the Molex because it's got such an easy pin out and it's so easy to uh correctly read the voltages with your volt meter and in saying that I don't have much experience with EVGA power supplies a lot of people in the comments we're talking about EVGA power supplies unfortunately in Australia they don't really sell EVGA power supplies they haven't really sold them in the past Corsair generally for the high-end power supplies here was one of the most popular brands the one really good thing about the Corsair power supplies if you guys didn't know this was they've got their system of mainly type 3 and type four power supply cables and these are actually interchangeable type 3 and type four can both fit the same power supplies except the 24 pin motherboard cable and that has an actual different layout and that actually won't fit the rear of the power supply if it's a type 3 that needs to fit a type four and vice versa so in other words you can't really it up if you've got Corsair type 3 and type four cables that you need to fit to Corsair power supplies and here we are guys with all that out of the way we are now at conclusion time with used power supplies that do not come included with cables now the most important thing you can have if you decide to pick up these power supplies like I did is firstly make sure you get them for a bargain secondly always have a voltage meter handy and that was something that I just I should have mentioned in that used power supply so um sorry that us PC parts on I thank you guys for pointing that out but then I felt like the replies in the comments to that comment was just just like a Pyon effect it's like oh someone's critiqued him for something he made a mistake and then it's just like throw the power supplies in the bin I'm not throwing $1,400 of power suppli in the bin especially when they all work perfectly fine but what we did here today is I wanted to show you guys some things that I do behind the scenes and I guess I've never I don't know if I've talked about this in the past I think I've done it in budget builds in the past with b-roll where I've rewired P plays on the Seder and the um MOX connectors and I've solded that in videos but at the same time I shouldn't assume that uh new viewers know what I've done in the past so again do apologize for not talking about that in these parts time but what we see here today is you can extract so much value out of these used power supplies it's something that I've been doing for a long time now and I'm going to keep doing it because as you saw here today I've just got to order a few more connectors those uh 24 pin motherboard connectors and then I'm good to go so in closing off just like we said in the intro if you're nervous about these kinds of things I probably wouldn't do it but if you are a little bit adventurous and you have say an old crappy build lying around and a voltage meter and you think you can tackle this then I I think you're going to extract a lot of value out of this uh one thing that did surprise me coming out of today's video was that 24 pin even though it connected perfectly into that PowerPlay it was actually a different um motherboard connector and the reason I knew that was CU it just was spitting out weird voltages on this voltmeter and so I'm not going to use that at all and then the next thing that we had was that crappy build that is invaluable because that is your final test to make sure you're getting a signal out your hard drive you can feel that spinning your fan is on Etc so I always recommend that as the final layer of protection now in the P play tester we did it on the first P play and then I just skipped it for the rest because we're using the same Corsair power supplies and I've already tested them in the partson I know they all work fine they're giving out good readings and the voltage levels are fine but I would do that three-step process voltage meter power supply tester and then a crappy build and then you're ready for the prime time after that though in saying that I hope you guys enjoyed today's video enjoyed going sort of behind the scenes with how I deal with used power supplies and just yeah the bargain that I got here I still think it one of the best deals I've got all year for $250 Aussie doll I've only got to spend another I think 45 Aussie doll to get the rest of the power supplies pieced out and I also got another four power supplies that were already good to go without any messing around and two of those I've already pieced out in builds flipped them and they're absolutely fine so in total we've got 10 working power supplies that are all really high powered power supplies for $295 Aussie which is incredibly good value because I can use those all in high in builds now and I don't have to go out and buy $150 power supplies or even in the case of a hx1200 a $300 power supply so awesome for me but if you disagree I can't help you you know I can't please you if you think differently but I'm just showing you the whole routine here today breaking it down and hopefully it helps someone out there if they've been wondering what to do with power supplies they come into and they don't have the connectors and that's why I just over time I just keep connectors from power supplies because a lot of people do sell modular power supplies without the cables and they do sell them very cheap anyhow guys with all that aside do let us know in the comments section below what's your experience with used power supplies especially used power supplies without modular cables also the final thing is if there is any unsuspected smoke or anything at normal just turn the power off straight away that's one thing you've always got to remember don't forget that anything's abnormal and you see smoke especially just turn turn everything off that's a that's the last thing I'll say before I get on out of you and I'll catch you in another takech video very soon love reading those thoughts and opinions as always please out for now bye\n"