how to use two power supplies in one computer now there's a lot of different
reasons to do this I know back in the day when I was in high school the reason
we did it was to have more hard drives in one Tower because back then a lot of
hard drives would take up a lot of power pretty much the highest power supply we
had at our disposal at the time was 250 watts now I have seen a lot of people
still do this today primarily for video cards because video cards take up a lot
of power so I'm going to show you how to do that today okay so we have here a
secondary power supply we have our main PC here with its own power supply now
granted this is a 750 watt which is enough power to power this 960 g-force
video card for the sake of testing I'm going to be using this machine and a 300
watt power supply okay so in a lot of different tutorials I've seen they've
actually jumped the 24 pin connector with like a paperclip that is really
unsafe and it's not going to work every time unless you go in there and actually
solder the wires so what you can actually use is you can actually use a
power supply tester that way when you switch on the power supply the power
supply actually turns on and sends power to all of the connectors so we have a
video card connector on the 300 watt power supply we have a means of turning
it on this particular power supply does have a back switch I would highly
recommend getting one with a back switch or having a means of switching it on
because you do want to turn this on the same time you turn on your main system
so here we're actually just going to take the primary power supply connector
to the video card out and we're going to plug in our secondary keep in mind this
is still in the off position for both machines and now what we want to do is
we actually want to turn on the computer and the power supply at the same time so
registers as its own power unit
okay we are getting a display which is a very good sign I'm basically we're just
going to booty to make sure it doesn't error out
okay so technically that was a successful test the machine is on and
both power supplies are running this power supply is solely running the video
card I don't know how well you can hear me off her the humming of both power
supplies and all the hard drives that happen here this is a really good way to
utilize two old power supplies whether you're waiting for a higher end power
supply to come in the mail or if you are just running too much in the rig like
multiple CD drives multiple hard drives multiple video cards etc this is just a
great way to minimize the cost of getting a thousand a couple thousand
watt power supplies or even higher wattage just real quick just to kind of
give you guys an idea the downside to doing this is turning on
and turning off your PC when you turn off your PC you kind of have to turn it
on around the same time on the secondary power supply because you don't want to
send extra juice to the board when the actual computer is off I have heard of
some problems here and there in the past also what you turn them on you do want
to turn on at the same time which is why I highly recommend that it actually has
a switch on the back for the secondary power supply or an odd button switch
some of them even have that if you have any questions comments or concerns about
this configuration please feel free to post them below and so next time I have