Thread: 24 pin connection

hello all. i just installed my new hard drive today, a 500GB SATA seagate barracuda. after getting everything together the system would not boot up. the fans come on, but no POST. after a little reading, i found a forum that a guy disconnected the 4pin connector on the 24 pin power cable. i did this and the system booted just fine. i am installing windows right now. my question is, what the hell is that 4 pins for? this is my old setup:

asus a8n5x mobo
amd athlon 64 3200+
1 gig corsair pc3200
radeon x800GTO
3 IDE hard drives 120gb and 2 10gb drives
dvd rom and floppy

my new setup is the same, except that i removed all IDE hard drives. i am now only running the 500gb sata drive. is that 4 pin used for extra juice for the IDE drives? just seems weird to me that it would work with the plug disconnected. thoughts? anyone?

My guess is power?

i hope that was sarcasm... i know it's for power, it comes from the power supply. the question is what does it power and why would i have to disconnect it for the system to boot up?

Just wondering - did the guy that you learned from also have an Asus A8N5X?

The extra 4 pins provide extra current for ground, 12V, 5V, and 3.3V. They were introduced along with PCIe slots and provide extra current to the motherboard. They do NOT supply any new signals or voltages - so generally you can run without the connector. Whether running without the connector is a problem depends on many factors, but I would say you are probably safe unless you start drawing more current from the motherboard with more memory, new video card, sound card, network card, etc.

Since the 4-pin connector provides an additional ground connection the problem could be a ground loop or ground bounce. If that is the problem then it would be inherent in the circuit board layout of the motherboard. Whether a user experiences the problem depends on a tolerance stack up of the system, e.g. power supply source impedance, current draw and current distribution among peripherals, tolerances of logic levels on the address and data pins for the CPU, memory, and the like.

Originally Posted by MoufRoof

i hope that was sarcasm... i know it's for power, it comes from the power supply. the question is what does it power and why would i have to disconnect it for the system to boot up?

If you want it to be, it is.


Go with bacon's answer

Playing the Survival mode has made this particular issue more obvious than ever.

This does not happen all the time, but I've noticed it on enough occasions that I feel it warrants being discussed.

Lets say that I am playing as Francis, and I am standing on top of a pile of propane tanks. Zoey is standing right next to me. If I pull out a gun and shoot the propane tanks that I'm standing on top of, there's a good chance that I won't take any damage at all. In fact, the way it seems to work, from my limited testing, is that if [another survivor] takes damage, then I won't take damage. Or if I take damage, then [another survivor] won't take damage.

In short, it seems like there is something wrong with the way Area of Effect damage is calculated that makes it not apply to all targets in range.



While raising awareness of this bug, I also want to say that I think that fire and explosive damage should be increased on Survivors across the board. There should be penalties for being too close to an explosive you set off, and right now that penalty is almost nonexistent. The same goes for fire damage, which is little more than a tickle to Survivors but extremely deadly to Infected.

Nope, me and 3 friends stood on 6 propane tanks and we all got incapped when we threw a pipe straight down

maybe there's an invisible wall