you know what's crazy if you think about it even going back 20 years whether
we're talking 20 pin versus 24 pin atx
or 4 versus 8 pin CPU connectors
motherboards and power supplies have been mostly interchangeable you just
left some pins unpopulated or had the extras hanging off the side and the
system would limp along as best as it could well today
that all changes as far as i can tell i am the first to
go hands-on with the brand new atx 12vo
standard now this looks perfectly normal
at first glance but wait what about this
gone is the 24 pin connector gone is the 5
volt rail gun is the 3.3 volt rail
they're not there this will not work with your motherboard
but why though Linus why do you wait so long to tell us about
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we don't have much in the way of packaging these are not retail units
actually either of them but uh we're gonna do our best to unbox this thing so
perfectly normal looking in every way except if you look really closely all
we've got is 12 volt and 12 volt standby
none of the other typical rails that you'd find on a power supply also the
cabling harness has some extra little surprises for us
replacing our 24 pin connector is this
right here so it's like a 10 pin brick but there's actually only nine
conductors in it for whatever reason that would be we've got
a four plus four pin so the 12 volt CPU connector remains in fact this unit has
yep here we go two of them there's another one of those we've got a
handful of six pin and six plus twos for
graphics cards and then the other notable omission is where's all the SATA
and molex connectors well we do have one lead that's got a
SATA and then two molexes but if you look the 3.3 volt and 5 volt conductors
aren't there so they're just 12 volt which means
whatever you're powering with these would have to not require any 5 volt
power so for example if you had a fan controller or like a front panel
thing on your case that used to say the connector but only needed 12 volt power
you could use it for this so it's mechanically compatible but not
necessarily electrically compatible with every device that it would plug into
there's gonna be some headache and heartache
in this transition now that's curious one of these six pins
is keyed the same as a pci express connector which would lead me to believe
that it delivers the same voltages but it's not labeled PCIe which i have to
wonder is that intentional is it
is it intended to be used it is
how interesting let's take a look at the
motherboard this is the asrock z490
phantom gaming 4sr and to my knowledge
this is the only atx 12vo motherboard
that's actually in existence right now outside of just a
lab somewhere asrock worked with Intel to develop this thing and
other than the atx 12vo portion of the
board we'll have a look at in a moment here it's pretty normal looking so you
got your lga 1200 socket dual channel memory you got your brm cooling you got
your dual PCIe 16x slots all that normal stuff but here up here this is where
things get spicy so that's where that 10
pin connector goes this is called the atx 12vo connector and then that second
six pin that is otherwise identical to
pci express 6 pin is apparently called atx board power 2.
and then these are fascinating so just like we saw on the mac pro where
if you wanted to plug in a SATA drive you actually had to
plug off of the motherboard in order to deliver power to it well we're seeing
exactly the same thing here so these are SATA power connector one and two
remember what i said about that SATA power connector on the power supply it
doesn't have all of the conductors in it so we actually need to take 12 volt into
the motherboard use this dc to dc conversion circuitry and then
come out here in order to properly power up a SATA drive
before you ask where you can buy it though this motherboard is not intended
for sales in the regular channel and it's actually for system integrators who
want to be among the first to adopt this new standard let's talk about why
but first some background i don't want to learn
too bad at a very basic level a computer
power supply converts the ac or alternating current from your wall into
the dc or direct current that the integrated circuits in your pc need to
operate a CPU's logic gates wouldn't work very
well if the electrons were flowing first one way then the other 60 times a second
the harder part of a power supply's job is that it needs to simultaneously do
this multiple times over supplying a variety of different voltages to the
various parts of your system and it
needs to output within very tight tolerances to avoid unnecessary wear and
tear think about how your house lights might dim a little bit when you fire up your
clothes dryer that ain't ideal for sensitive electronics so a good power
supply provides steady clean power to
for example your graphics card whether your CPU is sitting there doing nothing
or just spinning up a big rendering project
the final challenge for a power supply is that it needs to do all of this
efficiently not only does any wasted energy get converted to heat making your
pc run hotter and louder due to the extra cooling requirements it also just
plain wastes energy putting more strain on the electrical grid and adding more
pollution to the environment with no real benefit whatsoever so on the one
hand it's great that we've enjoyed this period of unprecedented
intergenerational compatibility because the evolutions of the atx standard have
been mostly geared around delivering more juice to keep up with ever more
power-hungry hardware but on the other hand meanwhile the rest
of the world has been barreling towards an energy consumption crisis of humanity
threatening proportions and industries like utilities transportation hvac and
consumer electronics have been under pressure from regulatory bodies to hit
ever more aggressive energy efficiency targets so that
is what's driving the new standard that we're looking at here
now to be clear it's not like computer power supplies
haven't gotten more efficient 80 plus marketing has been great for raising
consumer awareness of power supply efficiency
but something you probably don't know is that a basic 80 plus certified power
supply is only required to hit 80
efficiency at 20 load or more
which only really happens when you're actually doing something with your
computer let's take this machine for example it's
got a 650 watt power supply and sitting
here at the Windows desktop it's sucking back
anywhere between 60 and 80 watts
that's only about 9
at these kinds of loads according to Intel we could be looking at as low as
50 to 60 efficiency
let's swap out the power supply and motherboard with our new atx 12vo setup
and see how it goes i actually have not tried this so
good luck everybody now i may have put myself at a bit of a disadvantage here
because the lower you go in terms of power consumption the less efficient a
conventional power supply is so the fact that i even have a discrete graphics
card in here means that we might not see as extreme an improvement as we would if
we were running say on board graphics things like RGB lights on the memory are
also going to contribute to that i do still want to give it a crack
though given that this motherboard that we're trying out here is marketed as
i mean gaming is right in the name and it would be pretty atypical for a gamer
to not at least have some manner of discrete graphics card in their system
my muscle memory was like i'm hooking up a new motherboard i'ma put in my
hook up the new power supply i've seen articles about this
but i'm pretty sure i'm the first one to actually hook one up outside of a lab
the fact that we have so many pins i mean it's ten plus six this is 16 pins
it sort of raises the question why didn't they just do like
two eight pin connectors which we already have and if they didn't want to
reuse connectors we already have why did they use a pci e6 pin just seems like if
part of the goal was to reduce the bulk of the connector then
mission not accomplished it's like very similar
oh is that it wait are we ready
atx 12vo here we go ladies and gentlemen
i'm rooting for you atx12vu ah excellent uh date and time not set
who cares this is huge
i was not expecting this holy crap right
that's actually way better than i was expecting
you know what the crazy part of this is i was just guessing at what kind of
grade of efficiency power supply this was if you google this part number
literally zero google results come up nothing so i was just guessing 650 i
know it's 650 watt but i was guessing gd was going to mean that they were
targeting kind of 80 plus gold ish efficiency so that's why we picked an 80
plus gold power supply so this is a seasonic focus gold to compare it to and
even though we've got a graphics card and everything we just cut our idle
power consumption literally in half less than half
what about like rendering i'm really glad you asked so
these changes are really focused on idle
power consumption and once you reach the wheelhouse of a conventional power
supply which is typically around 50 load
the advantages pretty much disappear so that was why i
didn't do like a heavy load test before and after i'm not expecting really any
savings there so that raises the question
why is this so much better i'm so glad we got this result because the rest of
the video is scripted according to it's better here's the thing converting from ac to
dc power is extremely inefficient and conventional power supplies do it
multiple times for the multiple voltages
that they need to supply now it's actually better to go from ac to 12 volt
only like we're doing here and then derive the other required dc voltages
from that so Intel figures we should be able to get as high as 75
efficiency even at just 8 to 10 watts
but minus you might say some high-end power
supplies do that already anyway so to
meet upcoming energy efficiency standards like top runner from japan cec
tier 2 and energy star 8.0 Intel and
their partners went a step further that is why the 12 volt down conversion is
taking place here on the motherboard rather than in the power supply
because the higher the voltage the less
conduction loss we're going to need to deal with over the runs of wire that go
to the motherboard so by having only 12 volt and 12 volt standby coming from the
power supply you actually get marginally less loss there as well now there is an
increase in board space and you can see here how much is required for not just
the voltage conversion but even these extra connectors that you need for
things like you know hard drives but Intel says that from the boards that
they've seen this is still achievable for micro atx boards now it'll add some
cost on the motherboard side but you should end up saving some cost on the
power supply side and it should end up being about a wash for the consumer so
it works um now what
for most people nothing at the moment this standard is poised to play a much
bigger role in system integrator machines that are targeting government
or other institutions that have efficiency targets to hit while the 24
pin standard still makes up for its inefficiency with the convenience of
forward and backwards compatibility for enthusiasts
in the long term though who knows it might end up being a big success like
the eps 8-pin CPU connector that was
ultimately adopted by AMD as processor power consumption exploded in the early
knots or it might be a crushing failure like btx which incidentally was also an
Intel standard that started out as a system integrator only play speaking of
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