Beginners Question: Can I power on a system with a CPU attached?

[neiljwd]

EDIT **WITHOUT a CPU** attached the topic title should say, deary me.

I purchased an AIO cooling system (Raijintek Triton) and I've read that AIO should be ran for a little as a test... however I don't want it on my CPU to test... as if it breaks that seems bad to me.

Can I just attach power cables to my mother board and turn it on, will that supply power to my pump as long as that's plugged into my MB? Should I have Ram in there, or anything?

Literally just put the unit down, so prompt answers appreciated thanks.

 

[neiljwd]

Thanks for posting both.

Yes you can but make sure you cool your cpu , dont want to overheat.

Yeah I screwed up the topic title I meant WITHOUT a CPU in place, being as im testing a CPU cooler, I didn't want it ontop of the component I'm trying to protect.

With no CPU detected your motherboard may refuse to start.

You could use the supplied air cooler as a temp solution or use adapters to run the Cooler direct from the Psu.

It's Skylake so no supplied cooler sadly (nor to hand current build is AM3 AMD) don't think I have any adaptors.

If I just power on the MB it'll either work or refuse to start? I can't just completely blow it any way like this?

 

[neiljwd]

Fair enough, cheers for the input, I shall proceed, but with caution. Thank you.

If I don't post again within 2 hours, I've either blown myself up and died, or blown a component up and killed myself out of despair.

 

[neiljwd]

In the end, I had no alternative (other than patience, lol ) to just make the build and hope for the best. Nothings broke!

But I had a real headache achieving anything at all. Took an hour to hear my 1st post beep- and another 90 mins before I SAW my BIOS screen. Asus z170 boards HDMI is bugged, doesn't display ¬_¬.

SO yeah. That was annoying, and I'm now exhausted, but my Hardware seems intact, threads done and dusted, thank you.

 

[neiljwd]

For future reference you can jump start the psu using the paperclip test or you can buy one of these. That way you can leak test outside the case with nothing else connected. Quite surprised that nobody suggested this.

I have one of those clips, worked fine, but I had no way to connect my AIO to the PSU. AIO wasn't Molex powered, obviously. Only way is to plug it into the MB, and then power up the MB.
Unless I'm missing something? I am a newb.

 

[neiljwd]

Didn't your Triton come with a molex to 4 pin fan connector as shown in the 5th picture here?

It did not no... hmmm. There's was 1 molex connector, but that was for 2 included fans, the pump only had the weird 3 prong thing into the MB (don't know it's name sorry).

^
Use an adapter. a lot of fans/motherboards/pumps and coolers come with them now, so i am sure you have one knocking about for this build/

I'm new to this, so the only old PC parts I have lying around are IDE cables and a parallel port adapter lol!

 

[neiljwd]

I don't have a molex to fan adaptor

 

[neiljwd]

Perhaps it's a peculiarity of this AIO.

The 2 fans are 100% separate from the Pump/Radiator. They even sell a core version without the fans. The 2 fans are joined together, and have a fan header,' You just attach the fans next to the radiator, there's no actual connection.
The Pump/radiator just had a fan header.

I hope that's made it clearer, sorry for the confusion! Think what I'll take away from this is I need to buy some sort of molex to 'fan header' adapter to add to my box of bits.

Fan header in quotation marks as I have no idea what that connection's called

 

[neiljwd]

EDIT/UPDATE::
If you couldn't already tell, I'm a dummy. Nothings changed in regards to me being able to test the AIO, but I felt I should point out there was NO molex in the AIO package at all.

I'd dumbly assumed the molex hanging from my roof was for the fans, it wasn't, it was for the case's LED's. Apologies for the misinformation.