Okay, let's have a look here, um ideal for electrical fires. Okay,
perfect! Now we can get started. In a recent video, I revisited the age-old
used Dell Optiplex, plus old graphics card budget gaming pc meta, and in that video,
I used one of these heinous little things. Which is a dual SATA to PCIe 8 pin adapter,
and understandably, a lot of you in the comment section were saying, "Dawid, using this adapter
is equivalent to just eating the skin off of KFC and then leaving the naked chicken
for your roommates". In other words, it is an easy way to get yourself killed. Which
immediately got me excited. So, what we're gonna do in today's video, is see how easy
it is to get one of these connectors to fail safely, in a controlled environment.
Now, one of the main reasons why these little bastards are so problematic,
is because each of these SATA connectors is rated for a max power draw of about 54 watts. And to
be fair, even that's quite high considering that low-quality SATA power connectors have
been known to fail just powering hard drives that use less power than that.
And when you go over to this side this PCIe 8-pin connector is rated for 150 watts of power draw.
Now I regularly state that I am no mathematician but as far as I know 54 times 2 is definitely less
than a 150. So it means that this connector can easily overdraw what these two can safely
provide and that's when all of the terrible things happen. Um, so yeah, let's start off
by getting a baseline reading of more or less how much power this GTX 960 is going to draw,
and how much it'll draw through this connector, and then we'll try and push it to failure.
Now for today's video, I bought this very exciting piece of tech which is an infrared
thermometer. Now, it essentially uses a laser to detect the temperature of things without
touching it, which makes it probably the most futuristic thing that I own. Now unfortunately,
I couldn't afford to buy a Fleur, which would have been a bit more exciting than this,
but I don't have the kind of production budget that would allow me to spend two thousand dollars
on a thing that I use once and then get shouted at for using wrong and never use again. So I thought
70 dollars was a lot more reasonable for something that I get shouted at for using wrong XD.
I think the part of this thing that I'm the most excited about is the fact that it
actually comes with batteries included which is madness! oh hell yeah!
For today's test, I'm not going to be using the 70-year-old Dell Optiplex that I stole from a
school's computer lab, because the i5 in there was actually bottlenecking the GTX 960. And because we
want the maximum load possible on this little connector I want the graphics card working as
hard as possible. So, instead, I'm using a Ryzen 5 2600 with 16 gigs of ram running at 3200 megahertz
which should alleviate the bottleneck enough, even with a beefier graphics card.
Now we're going to start off with GTA 5. Considering the Ryzen 5 2600 in there, we're
not going to have a CPU bottleneck. So we should get a, you know, pretty high GPU utilization.
Now, as you can see it's fluctuating between the mid-80s to the high 90s in terms of power draw
so let's give it 15-20 minutes and then see if the connectors warm up at all.
After about a half an hour we briefly, very briefly, peaked at a hundred watts power draw but
it's kind of been averaging in the low 90s so let's do a quick temperature measurement.
Oh okay, uh, well it seems like, despite the hundred-ish watts of power draw, it's
barely affect the temperatures of the connector. Now, before swapping out the graphics cards,
I decided to run furmark, and as you can see it is drawing significantly
more power. So that means things should get a bit more spicy on those connectors.
Okay we are now about five minutes into a session of Furmark and the connector is actually starting
to warm up now, so I'm going to give it a bit more time and then see how hot this little SATA
connector gets. Now, about 40 minutes into a session of Furmark, and it's barely warm to
the touch at this point. Uh, now again bear in mind this is pretty much a best-case scenario,
we are open-air and there is a low ambient temperature, that's helping this connector out,
but with a sustained 150-watt power draw on that graphics card connector seems to be doing okay for
the time being. So I guess now we need to drop in a higher TDP graphics card and see what happens.
And now I've upped the ante quite significantly. We've got an RX 580 which is actually the highest
TDP card that I have with a single eight-pin connector. And I think with Fermark we should be
able to saturate the total combined 225 watts that the PCIe connector and the eight-pin can provide.
So yeah, let's see if we can get this connector to fail. It's actually not drawing that much more
power than the GTX 960 was while gaming. At least we are sitting at about 100 utilization and it's
still just at like 120 watts, but let me try something quickly. Let's do that and see,
oh um, never mind. Okay well I think the easiest way to get higher sustained power draw from the
graphics card is with Furmark so let's move over to that. So we're sitting at about 180
watts so that means that we're very close to the rated limit of what those two connectors
combined should be able to provide. A few moments later, just under 20 minutes in,
and our dubiously accurate reading says that we're at about 37.5 which is a lot higher than
it's been at any point up until now. Um, it's slowly been climbing but it's been sticking
under 40 degrees celsius. So now I think we need to up the ante a bit. Okay, so we're just gonna
do that now. At this point, we are definitely over the safe-rated spec for these two connectors,
so I guess we're just gonna have to run it until it fails. Oh yeah, it's not having a good time now
okay. We are now 20 minutes in and everything's going strong. Now, this spot on the connector
seems to give us by far the highest temperature, which kind of makes sense,
so I'm gonna keep my eye on that little bit. We have hit about an hour and uh temperature-wise
on the hottest part of the connector we were getting almost 70 degrees celsius. Which
is warm. This is definitely not a recommended setup. Although, unfortunately, the temperature
plateaued about 20 minutes ago, which means the connector, unfortunately, seems to have survived.
Wow, um that was a bit anti-climactic. I was really hoping for some fireworks here,
but unfortunately, that didn't happen. Although, very clear Gary disclaimer here, this in no way
proves that these connectors are safe to use okay? This is essentially a best-case scenario,
with very low ambient temperatures and good airflow over the connectors and it was just
like an hour-long test, as opposed to months of continuous use. So, don't look at this video and
go awesome I am now gonna use these SATA to PCIe 8 pin adapters to run my RTX 3090. Because that is a
terrible idea and these connectors have a tendency for the actual plastic to wear down over time and
then the connector shorts out and starts a fire. So that's what you really need to be careful of.
However, in my opinion, and this is my opinion. You can do with this information what you will.
But, in the use case of a GTX 960, in an old Dell Optiplex, where let's face it, this graphics card
is CPU bound the majority of the time anyway. I think that these SATA to PCIe 8-pin adapters are a
reasonable, interim solution. Because while playing a game like Shadow of the Tomb Raider,
which had the highest GPU utilization in that Optiplex system, we were averaging like mid-80s
in terms of wattage used by the card, which means there's very little strain on those SATA
connectors. But again, I think it should only be used as an interim solution while you save up to
buy a good power supply with an adapter to replace the power supply in the Optiplex. Because that's
always a good investment, right? A good power supply is something that you can use in multiple,
future builds and it's basically just never a bad idea to buy a proper power supply. Um yeah,
so with that, thank you very much for watching, if you like the video, like and subscribe to the
channel for more videos like this one, and until the next video, thank you for watching, bye bye!