A couple of months ago, my Dual Opteron workstation died. for a while I didn’t know what had happened. And then I read a post by Richard Campbell where a machine of his died, similarly, and he realized his was caused by a dead power supply. Then, I started to think. Maybe my Opteron had died the same death. Well, after some checking of different power supplies, and then realizing that I hadn’t got one with all the connections (it requires an ATX 20+4 connector, and 2 CPU connectors, each 4pin), I left it for a while. I was told one of these power supplies was going to cost me, and cost me big. cheapest I got a quote for was 190EURO and that was a 850W power supply. considering the one it was replacing was only 300W, I decided against it.

This morning I rang a place, and they suggested, and this is the engineers own words, “A MacGyver hack” (hence the image). all cables on the power supply are color coded. taking the connector I needed off the old power supply and splicing it to the new one, he suggested, would work.

Well, he was right! :) My Opteron now posts, and it works. I tool the 8 pin CPU connector, which was off the old power supply, and then took some cables from the new power supply (there was a 6 pin, which I think is for PCI Express graphics cards, but could be wrong) and one of the 4 pin CPU connectors, and chopped their heads off. then, using one of those connector blocks (I’m not great at soldering, and couldn’t find the soldering iron anyway) and connected everything up. after one false start (tripped the breaker for my bedroom) and a bit more tweaking, I got it completely working!

Now to work out some issues around cooling… just to explain that, the old power supply sat behind 2 large heat syncs, each connected to the CPUs via Heat Pipes (photos eventually). the power supply had 2 small (but quite noisy) fans, which cooled the 2 heat syncs. now without that power supply, these are air cooled, but currently without any fan. Now to look into fixing that.