Hi Dean,

At 10:34 AM 9/30/2004 -0500, you wrote:
>My seven year old power supply seems to have failed.  I have made some
>observations and have some questions that somebody here might be able to
>answer.
>
>1)  A 24 pin motherboard connector is available on some new power supplies.
>I believe that this is for dual-cpu motherboards.  "Express."  Will most
>motherboards be using the express 24-pin connectors in the future?  (I had
>never heard of these before.)

Are you talking about the dual row 24 pin molex style connector instead of
the more inline style from the older motherboards? If so, then this is just
the ATX standard connector. This has been in use for several years. All
motherboards these days use the ATX standard.

>2)  There is a new connector with six pins in line on my new p.s.  What
>would this be there for?

This sounds like an SATA (Serial ATA) drive power connector. You will start
to see more of this as SATA drive interfaces become more popular. Many
motherboards now include SATA interfaces.

>3) (a)  There is no socket for plugging in my monitor, so I have to manually
>turn it on and off.  Has the monitor socket gone South with the need to cut
>costs?

This pretty much went out with the ATX standard. Since the ATX is
controlled by a low voltage momentary contact push switch rather than a
large AC switch, it would be more expensive to put in a relay to also turn
on the monitor power.

This brings up a point, if your system was old enough to not be up to the
ATX standard, then your mobo may be incompatible because it won't know how
to turn on the power supply, since ATX systems route the power on/off
signals from the motherboard itself. Check carefully to make sure that the
power supply will support an AT style motherboard.

>     (b)  Is there another way of doing this (other than a master switch, of
>course)?  I find that after almost 20 years of not turning off the monitor,
>I am now leaving it on when I shut down the computer.  My monitor is fairly
>old I guess.  Do the new monitors "turn on" automatically by sensing a video
>signal?

Most monitors (those that are Energy Start compliant) will go into a
reduced power state when they lose the video signal, either by powering off
the computer, or when the screen blanker kicks in (if you have this
enabled). However, they will still draw some power in this mode, so if you
want to completely turn it off, you would need to use the monitor power switch.


Russ Poffenberger
Credence Systems Corp.
[log in to unmask]

            Do you want to signoff PCBUILD or just change to
                    Digest mode - visit our web site:
                   http://freepctech.com/pcbuild.shtml