2nd PSU
 

I would like to run 2 PSU's on my i7 setup however I am unsure of how to get the second one to turn on without plugging it into a mobo. The power supplies are PC Power and Cooling 1200W ESA. Link here to manual http://www.pcpower.com/downloads/Tur...anual_3835.pdf I am wondering what wires I would need to jump to get the PSU to turn on.

Thanks

You can either jump the green wire to any of the black wires on the second PSU and turn it on manually.... or get something like this...

http://www.performance-pcs.com/catal...ducts_id=21193

+1 to the adapter that allows second one to get the "kick on" signal

I just took some spare wire and popped it in the tops of the 14/15 pins back when I ran dual PSUs

Make sure you have some 3.3 and 5v load on the second PSU

(like run your sata devices off of it.)

Well my plan was to run the CPU power and hard drives off one PSU and the GPU off the second PSU. Will this configuration work or would I be better to run the GPU's with the HDD and leave the PSU for the CPU on the other PSU.

If your going to split it up I would use the main PSU for the CPU and Board and power everything else with the second PSU.

Yah.

Back in hte day if you did not have load on the 3.3/5v rails, it could cause problems. Dunno if that is still the case. Which was why I recomended running sata drives off the second PSU (the real 5 wire sata power not hte molex adapted kind) A lot of PSU comapnies run only 4 wires to the sata ports, these are "adpaters" not really sata power plug. Must have the 5th line for 3.3v. (Without it I do not think you can hot swap the sata drives.)

Paper clip if anything:

http://img206.imageshack.us/img206/6893/dscn00691bn.jpg

The paper clip type method is best IMO and you can actually setup a switch to use so it's convenient and looks nice (if you care). The reason I say this is that when you add that adapter cable in you of course are increasing the number of connections and increasing overall resistance and potential points of failure blah blah.

The biggest reason I would say to stay away from the adapter is that the 3.3v rail runs through the 24 pin to supply power to your RAM, any hinkiness in that ckt will degrade your ability to stablize your RAM and could even cause damage.

I'm using the adapter with good results. Not to say the negative issues pointed to aren't valid. I would consider just running a couple of wires beeing just as good, if not better than the adapter, as it keeps one big connector out of the loop.

One advice along the road tho, to avoid grief: run your CPU, board and boot devices (any disk/optical you wanna boot from) off the primary PSU, as the second PSU will have a split second delay in powering up and may spin up the drives a little to late for the BIOS to detect them. I run the gfx and most of the fans (only one of the cpu fans run of the mobo, the rest from the second PSU via fan-adapters)
Pressing the reset switch after initial powering up will ofcourse fix the delay in surge from the second psu, and you will have a clean regular boot :)