First modular PSU - ummm... how do I plug it in to the motherboard?

I mentioned before that it has been about 20 years since I have built anything computer related. Turns out power supplies have changed a bit and I honestly don’t know what I need to do next.

I have an ASUS PRIME H310I-PLUS mother board and it has two ATX power connectors: 24-pin EATXPWR (motherboard power) and a 4-pin ATX12V (CPU power)

I also have a Cooler Master V850 80plus gold PSU and it has two outputs that are for the motherboard, a 10 pin and an 18 pin.

This is where I got lost or confused. Neither of the pin counts match the motherboard. Does this mean I bought an incompatible power supply / motherboard combination? Or does the 10P M/B corelate to the 4 pin CPU and the 18P M/B corelate to the 24 pin connections on the motherboard? I got three bags of cables from the guy when I bought the power supply and case. None of them appear to match my situation.

I honestly underestimated my ignorance level of modern hardware. I have read the manuals that came with both peoces of hardware, but they do not say anything about cables going anywhere. And I couldn’t find a video of this motherboard being hooked up to a power supply.

Any help is greatly appreciated. And evidently I’m going to need you to use small words for my feeble little mind!

There should be a single cable that has the 20+4 pin connector on one end for the larger connector on the motherboard, and split 10 and 18 pin connectors on the other end to connect to the PSU. As for the 4-pin on the motherboard, there should be a separate cable most likely labellee CPU that has an 8-pin connector on both ends. The motherboard end should split into two 4-pin connectors, one of which will fit in the motherboard connector. You should also have some 8-pin cables marked GPU or VGA or PCI, which would go into a dedicated graphics card if you have one.

Ah, I had not considered split connectors. I will go through my bags of cables again.

I just noticed that in the photo I uploaded, it clearly shows an 8 pin PCIE/CPU output. Thank you very much for the help!

Do make sure you don’t mix up cables from different modular PSUs; the pinout on the PSU side is not standardized, even within the same manufacturer.

1 Like

But those cables are keyed though, right? They would not easily plug into the PSU I hope.

One would hope, but that hope would be in vain.

I’ve plugged an EVGA GQ modular cable (for PCIE 6+2) into an EVGA G+ modular PSU; it fit perfectly, but had wrong pinout. Fortunately, the PSU’s breaker tripped before it fried my GPU.

1 Like