Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 18.32. A SATA power connector.
In the SATA power connector, each wire is connected to three terminal pins, and the wire numbering
is not in sync with the terminal numbering, which can be confusing.
If your power supply does not feature SATA power connectors, you can use an adapter to convert a
standard peripheral power connector to a SATA power connector (see
Figure 18.33
)
. However, such
adapters do not include the +3.3V power. Fortunately, though, this is not a problem for most
applications because most drives do not require +3.3V and use only +12V and +5V instead.
Figure 18.33. A peripheral-to-SATA power adapter.
Figure 18.33
shows a peripheral-to-SATA power connector adapter.
PCI Express Auxiliary Graphics Power Connectors
Although the ATX12V 2.x specification includes a 24-pin main power connector with more power
for devices such as video cards, the design was intended to power a video card drawing up to 75
watts maximum through the PCIe x16 slot. That is adequate for most video cards, but high-end gaming
or workstation cards usually need quite a bit more power. To accommodate graphics cards needing
more than 75 watts, the PCI-SIG (Special Interest Group) introduced two standards for supplying
additional power to a video card via additional graphics power connectors:
•
PCI Express x16 Graphics 150W-ATX Specification
—Published in October 2004, this
