power supply - Part Number for Motherboard ATX 24 Pin Male Header

I have a reasonably-decent old 20-pin PSU which I want to use on a newer 24-pin ATX motherboard.

I see that the ATX page on wikipedia mentions that 24-pin ATX is backward-compatible, and I can find 20-to-24 pin adapters to buy for a couple of dollars/pounds at lots of places, but I can't find any mention of restrictions on the use of these.

Will this work on any motherboard, or is it a per-motherboard compatibility question?

Are there any other restrictions like the level of power available (and hence the additional 4 pins with +12, +5 and +3.3V lines which are already on other pins)?

I have no exact information to provide you here, but my gut feel would be that you should only consider trying this if you have a relatively low-power system on the motherboard. Something with not too much memory, ideally no more than 1 hard-disk, and probably not too high-end a dual-core processor... if you have any kind of modern graphics card installed I would probably not even consider going there.

Note that what the 24-pin supply does, is add one additional supply line of +3.3V, +5V and +12V each. If you use the adapter you suggest it will copy one or more of the existing lines to supply these pins... which means that they need to share the additional load.

From having a look at the Wikipedia page you reference, it looks like the standard 20 pins have a decent number of +5V and +3.3V lines already, but there is only one +12V line, which gets duplicated by the extra 4 pins. I do not know offhand what hardware uses the +12V, but that would be my main stability concern when using the splitter attachment.

It is not recommended as exceeding the current draw available will cause the PSU to either lower voltages (which could damage components) or simply shutdown in overload. My recommendation is to buy a new PSU. Really, they're not expensive.

However, if the motherboard has a Molex socket, then use that as well as the 20-pin plug and you'll be fine. There also used to be adapters from a Molex socket to the 4-pin extension, which would also be fine.

A motherboard could work with just a 20-pin connector plugged in. Likely failure, if it fails, is the ATX silver box will shut down. Although, you need to accept the risk as solely your own when you do this.

In order to answer the question, we need to know what the motherboard specifications are for current draw from the power connector for each voltage rail, the specifications of the power supply, and what else you have powered by the power supply.

• An ATX silver box power supply, PSU, will have specifications rating how much current it can supply on each power rail (12V, 5V, 3.3V, -12V, 5Vstandby). Sometimes 12V is shared or split into different rails with different ratings.
• Motherboard manufacturer's typically don't break out their requirements to the detail necessary, though. You'd need the max requirements for each power rail as well for comparison.

I used a 20 pin power supply on a motherboard with a 24 pin socket for years with no problems at all.

I had forgotten all about it until this last weekend when I replaced the PSU (failing fan) and had to remove a sticker that the manufacturer had placed over the last 4 pins (with a little graphic indicating that they were needed only with a 24 pin PSU).

This was with an AMD Athlon64 X2 4800+ CPU, mobo video, 4GB RAM in 2 sticks, 3 hard disks, DVD writer and commonly running 7 USB devices, 6 of which are powered from the computer.

In retrospect, I am a little surprised.