How safe is it to use the paper clip trick?

A

Airbrushkid

2[H]4U
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Aug 27, 2007
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Long story. Have 2 power supplies. Connect using a Dual Power Supply 24-Pin ATX Motherboard Adapter Cable. Everything was fine for months. I decided to replace the older power supply with a new Corsair HXi 1000. All connected. But took several try's to get rig started. But after running for say 30 minutes to an hour, the rig would reboot by itself. The problem is it would hang at a black screen. I would have to power off and reboot several times again to get started. So this morning I got home from work and decided to try something different. I unplugged the new HXi 1000. Now the seems to run fine. But I need the second power supply up and running. For 4 of the video cards. I not sure but I think that the Dual Power Supply 24-Pin ATX Motherboard Adapter Cable is messed up. So I want to try the paper clip trick. And if it works I like to know how safe it would be to leave the paper clip in the 24 pin connector? The rig runs 24/7. I would cover the paper clip with tape. And I would be getting another new Dual Power Supply 24-Pin ATX Motherboard Adapter Cable asap.

Thank you for any help.
 
Pretty safe.

I have run tons of demo stuff like that. just make sure to isolate it from shorts iff you want to be on the paranoia side of things
 
Just cut a piece of wire that's about 1" in length. Trim both edges and stick each end, into the second PSU's ATX adapter.
 
The paperclip is safe but running dual PSUs? Oh hell no. There are all sorts of issues stemming from such shenanigans and I thought by today that totally died out. Are you aware of cross load issues and whatnot?
 
Done it before when I had a similar problem. It turned out one of my PSUs was faulty (misdiagnosed the GPU to be the problem) whenever a certain load was reached it would trip the protection circuit (load was no where near max) and it would shut off and refuse to start up for a good 30m-1hr. For dual PSUs I had one solely on the GPU and the other for everything else. Ran it for well over 24hrs without an issue.
 
Paperclip - safe

Dual PSU adapters - not so safe, depending on how sophisticated they are. You may have gotten lucky before.

If it's just plugs, bad idea. If it actually has some diodes and such, then it would work ok.
 
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I've gotten away with using a spade connector as a jumper. I currently have an add2psu on the way. seems to be a better solution then a straight cable based on what i have read.
 
How are dual PSU adapters not safe? What if both PSUs are the same model. I'm aware of the paper clip method and even made a bunch of my own in the past with short wires and atx pins. But using that method doesn't allow the mobo to cycle on/off the connected hardware to that PSU during reboots.
 
rive22 said:
How are dual PSU adapters not safe? What if both PSUs are the same model. I'm aware of the paper clip method and even made a bunch of my own in the past with short wires and atx pins. But using that method doesn't allow the mobo to cycle on/off the connected hardware to that PSU during reboots.
Click to expand...
Think the last part answers most of the 1st question
 
The paper clip method is fine...if you're really concerned you can ebay "PSU tester" plugs which are 20 pin ATX form with the 2 pins shorted.
 
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