Small Form Factor Epia TC power supply

Not sure if I should be posting this here or in Mod Guides really, but I guess it can always move later!

I have a VIA Epia TC10000 board, which is equipped with a 1GHz Nehemiah CPU and an on-board power supply which just takes a +12V input on a jack at the back, and can chuck out 60W through a connector to power drives etc. I'm using this board in my media server, which has a 120GB Hitachi and 2x 300GB Seagate drives. It was brought to my attention earlier this week that I may well be overstretching that 60W PSU by doing this, so I decided to investigate alternatives. Seems like nobody has had to uprate their TC power supply before, so I get to be the first to mess it up

I decided to pick up a Shuttle 200W power supply from eBay.



It turned up yesterday, brand-new and working perfectly. You may be able to see the slightly weird arrangement of power connectors - there's obviously the regular ATX connector, a P4 connector and a couple of lines with molexes and floppy connectors; however, there's also one molex on a short lead which is only wired for +12V, not for +5V. I guess this is for aux power for some Shuttle mobo or other, but it comes in useful for me too...

Now, how do I get power from this PSU to the TC when it has no ATX connector? The easiest way would be to carry on using the 240VAC->12VDC brick it comes with, but that's no fun, plus it'd need 2 kettle leads. So, I decided to assemble a lead to hook up to the Shuttle PSU. Since most of my parts bin is at home, I ended up dissecting the power brick and unsoldering the lead from it.



Crimped a couple of Molex pins onto the wires I desoldered, assembled into a Molex shell, and voila, a Molex -> 12VDC jack lead!



Hooked it up to the 12V-only Molex on the PSU, plugged it all together, then jammed a piece of paperclip into the trigger pin and a GND pin on the ATX connector to keep the PSU powered up as long as it's on, then just jump the pins on the mobo and it all boots up beautifully!

 

Good job man
So do you have to wire the power switch to the mobo and shuttle psu now?

 

Thanks
This machine is an always-on server, so I'm going to just hook the power switch up to the mobo and leave the PSU rigged so it's on as long as the kettle lead is plugged in. That way there's no problems with drives being slow to spin up and the BIOS not detecting them, and if I do need to shut it down properly I just shut down from Windows then turn off at the wall.

 

Well done, nice work but goddam, put a case on that thing

The achme PSU has a quite noisy 40x40x10 ?delta fan in it, you may way to mod a 60mm fan to the side or something.

 

Funnily enough, I was wondering about that. However, the machine's been on all day and the power supply is still running the fan at the lowest speed, so it's still very quiet.

It's getting a proper case when I go home over summer, I'm going to build one from alu etc. I'll have to post a project log I guess!

 

Huh... I think you'd be better off just jumping the green and black leads on the atx plug (and desolder everything else, force it on) and just use any old 12v line to power the mobo, and then just some other molexes for the drives. Just because I'm not sure how much power can actually go through the board safely, even if the PSU can handle it (EPIAs with the onboard accessory plug are really designed for a single slim CD/DVD and a laptop hard drive)

 

Umm, Firehed, that's exactly what I've done - sorry, maybe I should've made that a little clearer - I needed more than 60W for drives, so I needed another power supply. I planned to get a second (proper) PSU and run the board off a brick and the drives off the PSU, but then I decided that was untidy and I could make it neater by running the board off +12V from the PSU too.

 

Oh lol, well that makes more sense. I hadn't seen the ATX plug chopped off and shorted so that's just what I had assumed.

 

Ah, that's because I decided to do it the reversible way and leave the ATX plug in place, but just jam a piece of paperclip in between the green wire and a black wire - seems to work well enough!