Swapping modular cables between PSU's?

Dave · 2 Mar 2010 at 19:50

Hi all

Just got a lot of new parts, but my housemate took my Enermax modular PSU into labs yesterday to check it (it was involved in a power surge and a mobo fail) but he left the PCI-E modular connector in the labs.

He has a Silverstone modular PSU with a spare PCI-E cable knocking around - is it OK to just switch it? The Silverstone PCI-E cable has the same geometric arrangement as the one on my case, could there be any problem with incompatibilities? (say, different pins meaning different things on the 2 PSU brands?)

Cheers
Dave

JonJ678 · 2 Mar 2010 at 20:11

Should be fine, but easy enough to check with a multimeter I'd have thought. Take the cables out, start up the psu, determine which pins are 12V and which are 0V at each supply and if they match up and the cables are keyed the same it'll be fine.

What did he do to test it?

xBLiNG · 2 Mar 2010 at 20:15

Should be ok.

Dave · 2 Mar 2010 at 20:59

Cheers, just fired it all up and it's running great! Housemate is a physicist so he took it to the labs to test the rails with the multimeter there. Computer seems solid, Phenom II X4 system.

Thanks again! Fingers crossed no problems.

JonJ678 · 2 Mar 2010 at 21:50

Fired it up without testing? Brave, but if it wasn't going to work you'd know by now.

Testing with a multimeter under no load is better than nothing but not ideal, it's the values on the rails while it's actually running a computer that you need to worry about. This is harder to measure, hence my curiousity.

Monkey Puzzle · 2 Mar 2010 at 22:00

Not that brave, surely? - they're only cables after all... unless the silverstone was some piddly sff psu with girly pci-e cables and the enermax 1200w or something.

JonJ678 · 2 Mar 2010 at 22:19

Not worried about the gauge being too small, more that the pin arrangement that was most convenient in one psu might not be the same as the most convenient one in another. You can be certain the pinout at the graphics card end is the same on each, but there's no reason why silverstone would have to make the other end the same for all their models.