Dell Power Supply. ATX?

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swaaye

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My brother has a Dimension 4550. It's a P4 Northwood on a i845 mobo.

I've been thinking of upgrading his mobo so he'd have dual channel, and so we could overclock that glorious Northwood in there. The question is whether or not he has one of the infamous Dell proprietary power supplies.

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dim4550/techov.htm#1101836

I found the tech doc for the power supply. It looks entirely like an ATX supply except for pin 18 which is usually -5V in all the ATX specs I found in a google search.

Is this thing proprietary? I'm shocked to discover it appears only 1 wire is wrong.
 
swaaye said:
My brother has a Dimension 4550. It's a P4 Northwood on a i845 mobo.

I've been thinking of upgrading his mobo so he'd have dual channel, and so we could overclock that glorious Northwood in there. The question is whether or not he has one of the infamous Dell proprietary power supplies.

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dim4550/techov.htm#1101836

I found the tech doc for the power supply. It looks entirely like an ATX supply except for pin 18 which is usually -5V in all the ATX specs I found in a google search.

Is this thing proprietary? I'm shocked to discover it appears only 1 wire is wrong.
Click to expand...

You can read all the ATX spec revisions at http://www.formfactors.org

It looks like this is a standard ATX power supply, but I would be careful and make very sure before pluggin anything into it.

If I read Dell's table correctly, the pin you are concerned with being different is labeled as N/C and I would take this to mean "Not Connected". All the negative voltages are deprecated since a long time now. However, this would leave the question why does the -12v line have a blue wire? Hmmm.

You need the -5v (pin 18) for older mainboards (back in the AT ISA days. I guess this would include ATX boards like the 440LX used with the first Pentium IIs). I would think it is pretty much standard in the way that a 3rd party PSU will work on this mainboard, but this Dell powersupply will not work on all ATX mainboards (those requiring -5v). If you are worried about this you should simply be able to remove the -5v wire on the 3rd party PSU from pin 18 and there you have it. However, I don't think you will lose anything by keeping it there.

So, I think this +5v is actually a typo on Dell's part and it should read "-5v - Not Connected".
 
A just as big issue is wether the CASE is ATX or not. Dell has used cases with a very odd way of securing the mobo, not screws in the normal places, but weird metal clips...
 
Guden Oden said:
A just as big issue is wether the CASE is ATX or not. Dell has used cases with a very odd way of securing the mobo, not screws in the normal places, but weird metal clips...
Click to expand...

Hmmmm... Will check

{Sniping}Waste said:
Play it safe and get a new PSU for $30. Every Dell PSU I have seen is pinned out different and will fry a normal mobo.
Click to expand...


Ok.
 
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