Hello, I have a ATX power supply that does not have a 8-pin power connector. but the motherboard i have( XFX nForce 780i SLI) uses a 8-pin plug in. Can i use the 4-pin connector on it for half of it and be ok?
Depends on your board, check the manual and see if it will work with only a 4 pin, many that will have a flip up cap over the other 4 pins in the connector.
Interesting, you can try it, it wont hurt anything if it cant run with it, it just wont boot up properly or might behave strangely under heavy load if it does need the 8 pin connector
Hello, I have a ATX power supply that does not have a 8-pin power connector. but the motherboard i have( XFX nForce 780i SLI) uses a 8-pin plug in. Can i use the 4-pin connector on it for half of it and be ok?
The correct answer is no, it is not required. However, most modern power supplies have 8 pins so my question would be is the PSU good enough for your system?
The Intel Gigabyte manuals say that a 4 pin plug is sufficient for CPU's up to 120 watts. So for anything other than an EE chip, you should be OK.
(A Q6600 OC'd to 3.6 GHz with vcore set to 1.42 volts pulls 9.5 amps or 114 watts.)
I have seen 200 watts pulled off a 4 pin. So you can do a lot with a 4 pin if need be.
But I want to reiterate that the psu is of concern to me. There are lots of good PSU's with a 4 pin but most 4 pin psu are not so good. I am very interested to hear the OP's PSU model.