 You know, it's crazy if you think about it, even going back 20 years, whether we're talking 20 pin versus 24 pin ATX or four versus eight pin CPU connectors, motherboards and power supplies have been mostly interchangeable. You just left some pins unpopulated or had the extras hanging off the side and the system would limp along as best as it could. Well, today, that all changes. As far as I can tell, I am the first to go hands-on with the brand new ATX 12VO standard. Now, this looks perfectly normal at first glance, but wait, what about this? Gone is the 24 pin connector. Gone is the five volt rail. Gone is the 3.3 volt rail. They're not there. This will not work with your motherboard. But why though, Linus? Why do you wait so long to tell us about your sponsor? Like GlassWire. With GlassWire, you can instantly see your current and past network activity, detect malware and block badly behaving apps on your PC or Android device. Use offer code LINUS to get 25% off GlassWire at the link below. We don't have much in the way of packaging. These are not retail units, actually, either of them, but we're gonna do our best to unbox this thing. So perfectly normal looking in every way, except if you look really closely, all we've got is 12 volt and 12 volt standby. None of the other typical rails that you'd find on a power supply. Also, the cabling harness has some extra little surprises for us. Replacing our 24 pin connector is this right here. So it's like a 10 pin brick, but there's actually only nine conductors in it for whatever reason that would be. We've got a four plus four pin. So the 12 volt CPU connector remains. In fact, this unit has, yep, here we go, two of them. There's another one of those. We've got a handful of six pin and six plus twos for graphics cards. And then the other notable omission is, where's all the SATA and Molex connectors? Well, we do have one lead that's got a SATA and then two Molexes. But if you look, the 3.3 volt and five volt conductors aren't there. So they're just 12 volt, which means whatever you're powering with these would have to not require any five volt power. So for example, if you had a fan controller or like a front panel thing on your case that used a SATA connector, but only needed 12 volt power, you could use it for this. So it's mechanically compatible, but not necessarily electrically compatible with every device that it would plug into. There's gonna be some headache and heartache in this transition. Now that's curious. One of these six pins is keyed the same as a PCI express connector, which would lead me to believe that it delivers the same voltages, but it's not labeled PCIe, which I have to wonder, is that intentional? Is it intended to be used? It is. How interesting. Let's take a look at the motherboard. This is the ASRock Z490 Phantom Gaming 4SR. And to my knowledge, this is the only ATX12VO motherboard that's actually in existence right now outside of just a lab somewhere. ASRock worked with Intel to develop this thing. And other than the ATX12VO portion of the board, we'll have a look at in a moment here, it's pretty normal looking. So you've got your LGA 1200 socket, dual channel memory, you got your BRM cooling, you got your dual PCIe 16X slots, all that normal stuff. But here, up here, this is where things get spicy. So that's where that 10 pin connector goes. This is called the ATX12VO connector. And then that second six pin that is otherwise identical to PCI express six pin is apparently called ATX board power two. And then these are fascinating. So just like we saw on the Mac Pro, where if you wanted to plug in a SATA drive, you actually had to plug off of the motherboard in order to deliver power to it. Well, we're seeing exactly the same thing here. So these are SATA power connector one and two. Remember what I said about that SATA power connector on the power supply? It doesn't have all of the conductors in it. So we actually need to take 12 volt into the motherboard, use this DC to DC conversion circuitry, and then come out here in order to properly power up a SATA drive. Before you ask where you can buy it though, this motherboard is not intended for sales in the regular channel. And it's actually for system integrators who want to be among the first to adopt this new standard. Let's talk about why. But first some background. I don't wanna learn. Too bad. At a very basic level, a computer power supply converts the AC or alternating current from your wall into the DC or direct current that the integrated circuits in your PC need to operate. A CPU's logic gates wouldn't work very well if the electrons were flowing first one way, then the other 60 times a second. The harder part of a power supplies job is that it needs to simultaneously do this multiple times over, supplying a variety of different voltages to the various parts of your system. And it needs to output within very tight tolerances to avoid unnecessary wear and tear. Think about how your house lights might dim a little bit when you fire up your clothes dryer. That ain't ideal for sensitive electronics. So a good power supply provides steady, clean power to, for example, your graphics card, whether your CPU is sitting there doing nothing or just spinning up a big rendering project. The final challenge for power supply is that it needs to do all of this efficiently. Not only does any wasted energy get converted to heat, making your PC run hotter and louder due to the extra cooling requirements, it also just plain wastes energy, putting more strain on the electrical grid and adding more pollution to the environment with no real benefit whatsoever. So on the one hand, it's great that we've enjoyed this period of unprecedented intergenerational compatibility because the evolutions of the ATX standard have been mostly geared around delivering more juice to keep up with ever more power hungry hardware. But on the other hand, meanwhile, the rest of the world has been barreling towards an energy consumption crisis of humanity threatening proportions. And industries like utilities, transportation, HVAC and consumer electronics have been under pressure from regulatory bodies to ever more aggressive energy efficiency targets. So that is what's driving the new standard that we're looking at here. Now, to be clear, it's not like computer power supplies haven't gotten more efficient. 80 plus marketing has been great for raising consumer awareness of power supply efficiency. But something you probably don't know is that a basic 80 plus certified power supply is only required to hit 80% efficiency at 20% load or more, which only really happens when you're actually doing something with your computer. Let's take this machine for example. It's got a 650 watt power supply and sitting here at the Windows desktop, it's sucking back anywhere between 60 and 80 watts. That's only about 9%. At these kinds of loads, according to Intel, we could be looking at as low as 50 to 60% efficiency. Let's swap out the power supply and motherboard with our new ATX 12VO setup and see how it goes. I actually have not tried this, so good luck everybody. Now I may have put myself at a bit of a disadvantage here because the lower you go in terms of power consumption, the less efficient a conventional power supply is. So the fact that I even have a discrete graphics card in here means that we might not see as extreme an improvement as we would if we were running say onboard graphics. Things like RGB lights on the memory are also going to contribute to that. I do still wanna give it a crack though, given that this motherboard that we're trying out here is marketed as, I mean, gaming is right in the name and it would be pretty atypical for a gamer to not at least have some manner of discrete graphics card in their system. My muscle memory was like, I'm hooking up a new motherboard, I'ma put in my... So I hook up the new power supply. I've seen articles about this, but I'm pretty sure I'm the first one to actually hook one up outside of a lab. The fact that we have so many pins, I mean, it's 10 plus six, this is 16 pins. It sort of raises the question, why didn't they just do like two eight pin connectors, which we already have? And if they didn't wanna reuse connectors we already have, why did they use a PCIe six pin? Just seems like if part of the goal was to reduce the bulk of the connector, then mission not accomplished. Very similar. Oh, is that it? Wait, are we ready? All right, ATX 12VO. Here we go, ladies and gentlemen. I'm rooting for you ATX 12VO. Ah, excellent. Date and time not set. Who cares? This is huge. I was not expecting this. Holy crap. Right? That's actually way better than I was expecting. You know what the crazy part of this is? I was just guessing at what kind of grade of efficiency power supply this was. If you Google this part number, literally zero Google results come up, nothing. So I was just guessing 650, I know it's 650 watt, but I was guessing GD was gonna mean that they were targeting kind of 80 plus gold-ish efficiency. So that's why we picked an 80 plus gold power supply. So this is a Seasonic Focus Gold to compare it to. And even though we've got a graphics card and everything, we just cut our idle power consumption literally in half, less than half. What about like rendering? I'm really glad you asked. So these changes are really focused on idle power consumption. And once you reach the wheelhouse of a conventional power supply, which is typically around 50% load, the advantages pretty much disappear. So that was why I didn't do like a heavy load test before and after. I'm not expecting really any savings there. So that raises the question, why is this so much better? I'm so glad we got this result because the rest of the video is scripted according to it's better. Here's the thing, converting from AC to DC power is extremely inefficient. And conventional power supplies do it multiple times for the multiple voltages that they need to supply. Now it's actually better to go from AC to 12 volt only, like we're doing here, and then derive the other required DC voltages from that. So Intel figures, we should be able to get as high as 75% efficiency, even at just eight to 10 watts. But minus you might say. Some high-end power supplies do that already anyway. So to meet upcoming energy efficiency standards like Top Runner from Japan, CEC tier two, and Energy Star 8.0, Intel and their partners went a step further. That is why the 12 volt down conversion is taking place here on the motherboard rather than in the power supply. Because the higher the voltage, the less conduction loss we're gonna need to deal with over the runs of wire that go to the motherboard. So by having only 12 volt and 12 volt standby coming from the power supply, you actually get marginally less loss there as well. Now there is an increase in board space and you can see here how much is required for not just the voltage conversion, but even these extra connectors that you need for things like hard drives. But Intel says that from the boards that they've seen, this is still achievable for micro ATX boards. Now it'll add some cost on the motherboard side, but you should end up saving some costs on the power supply side, and it should end up being about a wash for the consumer. So it works. Now what? For most people, nothing. At the moment, this standard is poised to play a much bigger role in system integrator machines that are targeting government or other institutions that have efficiency targets to hit, while the 24 pin standard still makes up for its inefficiency with the convenience of forward and backwards compatibility for enthusiasts. In the longterm though, who knows? It might end up being a big success like the EPS eight pin CPU connector that was ultimately adopted by AMD as processor power consumption exploded in the early knots, or it might be a crushing failure like BTX, which incidentally was also an Intel standard that started out as a system integrator only play. Speaking of play. Play me off to the, whatever, sponsor. Thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring today's video. 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So go to squarespace.com slash LTT for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, you can get 10% off today. If you guys enjoy these kinds of techie or deep dives and you're looking for something else to watch, maybe check out our new Monix server rollout. We collabed with Wendell on that one, and it goes into sort of why an SSD can be too fast for your computer and actually cause all kinds of stability and data corruption issues. Oh, I never mentioned lttstore.com. So go check that out too.