Will This Adapter Set Fire To Your PC? 

Your OptiPlex is about 2 generations newer than the ones we are still using at work. You'd love them, about half of them have been upgraded with a GT710.

Why does the FurMark benchmark make me feel like I'm looking into the Eye of Sauron?

Remember that pcie slot is supposed to provide 75W to the card, so up to 150-200W cards should be more or less fine Gtx 960 is 120 w card I would be more worried about how much PSU can provide on 12 v rail

the 8 pin gpu power draw as per pci-sig’s specs is 150W but each 12V pin on the 8 pin connector itself should be able to carry up to 9A before things get hot based off molex’s specifications for mini ft jr. that means you could get up to 324W at 12V going through a single pcie 8 pin power connector. I wouldn’t recommend it but it’s possible lol Maybe if you do a sequel video you can try using that crazy power mod on a Vega 56 that allows it to draw 600W and try to blow up some other adapters, that could be fun

If you have any of those dual SATA to 8pin PCIe adapters lying around they can come in handy for 12V-4A solar panel / charge regulater / Lead-Acid deep cycle marine battery trickle charge.

Most of the problems I’ve seen with SATA power connectors are to do with very poor manufacturing quality that results in the connector shorting out internally even at modest loads.

"in a controlled environment" *pulls out fire extinguisher in a can*

A couple points: If you're using an infrared temperature monitor like that it's important to make sure it's calibrated correctly by pointing it at things you know the temperature of. While it mostly works better for contact thermometers, it's still useful to use ice water as a good baseline temperature reading just to make sure it's roughly in the area you want. Another thing that's important to remember is how power supplies actually provide power. If you ever open up one (DO NOT OPEN UP A POWER SUPPLY UNLESS YOU HAVE THE PROPER TRAINING AND KNOWLEDGE TO DO SO) then you'll usually see a bunch of individual wires going to each connector. Each of these wires has their own individual rating and in turn that can tell you how much you can safely push through any kind of connector. While other comments already talked about how the 75w coming from the pcie slot will affect it, it's also important to remember that the actual wires themselves are going to be the biggest factor in seeing if those cables burn up or not from the power supply. The reason you often see failures at the connectors rather than inside the wires themselves are almost always because of arcing between the actual connectors inside. Arcing creates a _lot_ of heat and often results in catastrophic failures like you saw in those pictures. It takes a lot of current to actually melt/destroy/burn a wire compared to the much more common scenario of arcing inside the connector itself. This is why you see so many success stories of people using those sata to 6/8 pin connectors without failure despite it being out of spec. Just wanted to point that out, still loved the video Dawid!

I have used these when adding GPUs to Optiplexes, but 1) have always limited the GPUs to lower-TDP models like the 120W GTX 1060 or the 100w 1650 Super, 2) never overclocked the GPUs off these, and 3) have always tested them running Furmark for a few hours and checking the temps periodically to make sure it's not heading up.

I'm using a dual SATA to 8pin for a GTX 1080ti. It was installed as a temporary solution but a year has passed since then. Still works. Although I undervolted the gpu to lower the temps.

I miss dawid comparing prebuilts to mid tier STDs. Those were the good old days.

Failing connectors are more likely to burn when there is some arcing happening. A good clean mechanical connection can handle quite some amps before failing. There are youtube videos on this subject.

Just a bit of practicality here for anyone who is forced to use similar connectors. 1. 2xMOLEX to 6-pin is totally fine as long as connectors are not damaged. 2. 2xMOLEX to 8-pin is a sketchy setup, but it works. You still may want to check it for traces of melting plastic and oxidization on pins once in a while. 3. SATA power connectors to either 6 or 8-pin for any kind of prolonged usage - is a nogo, "not even once". While MOLEX are not user-friendly and are generally unpleasant to operate, they are robust and reliable (or serviceable/repairable by a decently sapient user, to be exact). SATA power connectors are more user-friendly but are a total mess when it comes to actually, you know, delivering power. You may use SATA to 6/8-pin for short periods in a controlled/observed environment, but don't let them stay in your machine for years without observation. It is essential to understand that fire happens not momentarily when you connect unrated stuff and put it to use. It occurs when the electrical resistance (and therefore heat output) of contacts in the connector rises due to bad connection and/or oxidization of pins. Which progresses slowly during long-term exploitation and often remains unnoticed by users.

Just an FYI: the laser on handheld infrared thermometers like that is only for aiming. The infrared detection is done by a completely separate sensor.

Pair it with a budget psu. Let's see how those sata connectors hold up

If you increase the wire lenght, the amp draw will increase. Prehaps the connector is decent quality and the short run of wires helps prevent an issue.

But 75 watts is pulled from the motherboard so the 150 watts is actually only 85w from the adapter

50°C over ambient in a well ventilated environment... Now imagine a dusty case of 40°C with limited airflow, and some vibrations on the connectors.

Love the zeal for controlled chaos :) I used a Molex to SATA adapter/splitter to power my old server's WD Green 1TB hdd. One day, the server was not responding on the network. I opened it up and saw the splitter was burnt, and the circuit board on the hdd was damaged. I didn't have backups for much of the stuff on the drive. I was able to resurrect the drive with a board ordered off ebay for about $25.

Brings new meaning to Afterburner

This video is going to be the first in a series of videos in which Dawid desperately tries to induce electrical fires so he can feel justified in buying a thermal camera And I am completely on-board

70 dollars?! are you sure you can afford that? You still have to buy more pre-builds!

Lol he had his wallpaper as a combusting fire in anticipation of the adapter's possible end

It gets to a point where "thermal Runaway" occures. If the connector gets hot enough I will actually require more amps to compensate for the resistance of the connector . So the card will pull more power to compensate and that will in turn increase the heat/ internal resistance which in turn will draw more power to compensate until you have a melted connector.

Big fan Dawid. Your show is always entertaining!

The connectors were getting active airflow on them from the RX 580 GPU fans.

My main system is an old HP 8300 elitedesk Medium Tower, with a proprietary 320W PSU. Configuration is i7 3770, 32 GB DDR3 1600 dual channel, 1 HD, 1 SSD, , 1 external HD, DVD burner, Asus Soundcard and a RX 570 4 GB, that draws power from the exact same adapter you've tested. All the system is working perfectly fine for several years of intensive work use and gaming. Maximum draw of the system at the AC outlet is 265 W total (tested with Furmark). This adapter solution could be considered a long-term one, if needed.

The IR thermometer doesn't use the laser for measuring, it's just something to assist with aiming :D and the temps on the rest of the cable shouldn't have anything to do with the janky adapter

Pro Tip : When you purchase one of those Hand Held Thermometers, read the box and check for the + / - ... That way you can get better idea of the Actual Temp. Mine is a 5 deg = / - so that means its most likely off by at Most 5 deg . Keep that in mind when you use those . Cheers .

I added a Molex to SATA adapter to a Dell Inspiron Slim in my office so we could have an extra SSD drive in the PC. The adaptor went to the rarely used DVD drive. That connector basically burst into flames at the DVD drive after the PC was left on in a cabinet with the doors closed by a co-worker. The PC was about 10 years old but had an upgraded Seasonic power supply. Luckily the fire was contained in the case. The only damage was the PC (fried the Power Supply) and a really bad smell in the office for a few days.

Dawid I have been using those connectors on my gtx 960 oc for last 3 years. They have withstood pretty good despite me max overclocking my gpu.

I used these cables in a 7020 optiplex with its stock power supply. Paired with a GTX 970. As soon as I ran Time Spy with 3dmark it shutdown. I ended up replacing the power supply with a 500w evga one. And did away with the adapter cables. Worked just fine after that.

@Dawid Does Tech Stuff - The LASER is just an indicator for where the User points this temperature measuring gun

The previous Optiplex generation uses standard ATX power supplies. I have an old 3010 with and i5 3470 and replaced the PSU with an EVGA PSU.

I had an old HP with an Athlon 64 X2. It being my first PC with a video card needing PCIE power, I didn't know the power supply I bought for it had it already on there. I plugged in the GPU with one of those adapters (The one that came with it. It was a GTX 560Ti) I used that PC for 2-3 Years after, and my brother, who bought it after me used it for like 5 more after that. It was rock solid. The board ended up failing, but the GPU and the Cooler Master power supply survived. Edit: I even ended up overclocking that card a bit. I can't remember how much.

Dude you are impressive the ideas you have and how fun you are... love the channel much I watched at least 10 videos in a row the first time I found out about your channel. The soundtracks are perfect the quality everything about your channel is amazing I only wish there were more videos !

Gotta say - The RX 580 is a very efficient card. I've rarely seen it push over 140w when gaming with the official AMD game boost (to 1410Mhz) added.

0:37 And that's how you know you're in a Dawid video. _Grabs popcorn and enjoys the ride._

I'm glad you're doing these followup vids! They're probably among the most interesting ones you do. I still standby with the only using the SATA-to-PCIE 6-pin adapter. A bit safer than the 8-pin one since less potential for higher wattage. Less wear over time too. But it all depends.

I used that connector once on my RX580, Mine was two molex to 8 pin. Both of the molex melted but one molex was still usable... The 8 pin on the other end survived tho. I love being a sketchy and wacky person so what I did next was soldered the 8 pin to my PSU's 6 pin pcie connector(replacing it entirely with the 8 pin) and use the surviving molex as the two last negative wires on the 8 pin. Worked fine to this day

I misread PC Master Peasant as PC Master Pheasant and briefly amused myself with the mental image of a fowl gaming.

I've did it multiple times with older systems and newer graphics cards. Never been a problem.

Good to know fire extinguishers in a can exist

At 2:53 - Dawid's hands can be seen at 25 C - reptilian overlord confirmed, lol!

I've used this kind of connector with older video cards for years. They've always worked fine for me! I'll stop using them to power my 6900xt though.

one of these things did in fact kill my motherboard once. that was because one of the sata ends came unplugged, overloading the other one though

That Canadian Tire tool ahahaha I can recall! Nice video as always :)

I love your random ass videos, thanks for being different

the pccooler corona 5in1 uses the same connector to power 5 fans with a separate connector for their RGB, and mine ran no problem for almost 2 years but that heating problem does have a commutative effect and it eventually failed (burned) last September, luckily for me the burnt wire remain in its socket and the fire died immediately after the wire was severed. Also for those interested the room temp was around 27C.

I have been using one of these for years, and I have never had a problem, only difference is mine has a few more cables from the sata conecter to the 8 pin

Back in the day the saying used to be “Molex to SATA loose all your data”

That connector is probably good to about 85 C, so even though you pushed way too many amps through it in a naughty way you didn't really get to the point of actually killing the connector. Still, don't do that for real, people.

Great content as always. Much as expected, the 960 just can't pull that much juice. I did have one of those connectors fail but it was Molex to SATA running a WD hard drive, it ran for years and one day poof smoke and the PC wouldn't boot. Found the connector melted. It hangs above my desk at work. Replaced the connector and everything did worked fine just fyi whatever power protection was in the system shut it down without catastrophic failure. I think if you get something like a StarTech connector that uses slightly thicker gauge wire vs the freebee that came with some component the danger is reduced.

I know that this might be hard to find but you can probably find a motherboard that has a 25w pcie slot rather than a 75w that will make the connectors draw more current until they burn.

At the start of 2021, I upgraded my prebuilt's gpu from an apu, to a rx 570, and, because it didnt have an 8 pin connector to a gpu, i used that thing. Lowering the volts of the gpu to the minimum that the amd tool let me, I could use the gpu on idle and with little load, but not with much more than that so I ended up upgrading to a better psu.

in this episode Dawid attempts to set fire to mount E-Waste

Usually the ones that melt are the ones with aluminium wires. You probably got lucky with a copper one.

The company that builds computers for our equipment at work uses these, along with a very low end Asus motherboard and 500w slim line PSUs [reference the Ghost canyon NUC for size] ... and while statistically the failure rate is low, I *HAVE* seen these fail, most significantly melting the 8 pin connector and fusing it to a GPU. In this specific case they had both SATA cables connected to the same rail on the PSU. Mind you, I've worked with hundreds of our machines, and the failure rate so far is less than 5 machines... but it CAN happen.

That is the most Dawid fire extinguisher I could imagine

@Dawid the connector is rated when it's of quality. Not every cable is built the same, lower quality plastics will degrade faster under heat. This particular adapter also only uses two pinouts. If it were sustaining a load over the entire connector and the drive was saturated with a max read/write load, while also pushing that much power, you'd likely see a failure.

"Immediately got me excited" .... ROTFL materiel like this is why I never miss a video! :P

Here's a good rule of thumb for those dual sata to 6/8 pin. If you assume the SATA connector is safe for about 15-20 watts, since most drives should never pull much more than 10w (bar the 10-15k rpm drives) then with 75w from the PCIe slot (most cards are tuned to pull more from PEG) then you *can * safely power a card with a tdp of around 120w. Now I could do some math using guidelines from the CEC but it's the weekend

It's not often that the rating makes the cable fail it's usually time! Connections get dirty and corroded. That makes a high resistance which then gets hot and that's what can overheat. Another fail point is poor crimping of the wire to the pin. The wire is partly covered by the insulation, not a tight crimp, some of the conductors cut off as the insulation is removed. The use of aluminium and not copper because it's cheaper...the list goes on.

thanks for giving shout outs on the Zen+ architecture

Just FYI Dawid, you CAN get a FLIR camera for a lot less than the price you listed. The FLIR One Pro LT is a FLIR camera that attaches to your phone's USB-C port, and is only $310, they offer another phone attached model that is basically the same but with more features for $420, and they also offer the FLIR C5 and C7, which are in the $510-710 price range for a standalone camera. I've been considering getting a C5 for a while now personally, but i didn't know about the phone-attached cameras they offer either, so now IDK what I'll ultimately get lol.

Love people who spend a huge amount of money for cool graphics cards or CPU‘s or mainboards and mix it with a PSU for 50€ or less. The PSU is the most important device of the whole PC to keep the system save and sound.

Good old Canadian Tire. Thanks for the videos from a fellow Canadian.

I had a setup similar about 10 years ago. Dual 4 pin molex to 6 pin pci-e. Used it for a year or so. When I opened the case and saw the connectors...the molex that were supposed to be a clear white color were most definitely browned from the sustained heat (wires had discolored as well). Glad I didn't have a fire, but it was getting there. Would NOT recommend.

Dawid takes out an insurance policy in this episode!

I used this kind of SATA setup for around 2 years with RTX 3060 and the power supply had only 2 SATAs. So I splitted both of them to have two SSDs. I set the GPU limit to 120% and somehow it was fine. It was extremely low wattage PSU so when running whole system benchmark it was tripping. Worse thing was that the spot where the lead connects to the plastic housing of the SATA was getting very hot and I didn't even noticed that. One day I opened the case and noticed that the insulation was burned and the cable just falled from connector.

i used a few of these addapters on a mining rig a few years back, powering a couple of 980ti's. i think I had 4 of them and one almost set on fire. it wasn't the sata plug/connector that was at fault but the wire its self. good job I was around, I smelt it and immediately knew what it was.

It's very unlikely to "cause a fire" It may melt the plastic until it shorts and the current limiting in the psu trips.

I can confirm this cable set my Mac Pro 2010 on fire never use it when I was tuning an Nvidia gtx980 and AMD FirePro 7200 running in the machine. The FirePro was connected to it and the Mac Pro was boot looping and I could smell smoke, some how after removing the cable and the Mac Pro started and is still working to this day. Even the SATA port is still working just a little melted.

Mr. BitsBeTrippin got good comprehensive guide with good tech testing the PCI-E slot draw, 3090 went as high as 127W even though by standard maximum is 75W.

I was waiting for a classic Dawid line such as “it feels like it’s getting hotter than a first time couple on prom night” or “while it’s not quite as hot as Pamela Anderson running in slow motion on Baywatch I think it’s still running quite warm” 😂

Laser measuring temperature ? In Canada maybe, rest of the world infra-red sensors only. The laser is there to aim sensor

Makes sense Dawid uploaded this during Halloween. It was like waiting for a jump scare that would possibly kill some unforutunate component.

"In other words, it is an easy way to get yourself killed. Which immediately got me excited." Dawid, 2021.

Me: Is confused due to the temperature always being 21°C. Also me: Notices that has looked at the wrong number

FLIR Camera for iPhone or usb c can be bought on Amazon right now for $199

Now, get a 1 to 2 8-pin adapter on a giant GPU.

GPU-Z gives you the info on how much power is drawn by the PCI-e slot and the connector. Would have been interesting to have had the information in the video.

The connector probable didnt fail because you had the GPU fans pulling the hot air from the connector. Its ok to use for video cards with up to 150W TDP. I used a couple in prebuilts with 1050ti's that had only one 6 pin pcie connector, and they had 200W psu's. Theyre still going strong 2 years later.

I bought a cheap 2x6 pin to 1x8pin to run my Rx580 and they did set fire about an hour in to playing. It was the actual cables that burned through and then started shorting out. Good job I had the side off or I wouldn't have seen it as fast. I then tried an adapter that cost alot more and has been fine ever since.

justo tengo el mismo dell y pensaba comprar una gtx 960 tu video me callo del cielo

if it is in this case, it would stay cool... at Newegg: SSUPD Meshlicious Mini-ITX Small Form Factor (SFF) Case - Full Mesh Side Panel with PCIe 3.0 Riser Cable - Black Color, Tool-Free and Easy Accessibility

curious to what the temp would be if you had moved the connector to the other side of the card, out of the gpu fan airflow. Also I think what is reported as 'fire' is likely flameless connector burning. I've seen many car seat heater connectors burnt with no damage to anything beyond the pins and the plastic surrounding the pin melting. It isn't good but it isn't flaming.

On 5:27 the connectors are in front of the gpu fans. That also helps them cool.

When Dawid said safely in a control environment makes me really buy a new pc

as long as your card draws under 200 watts your fine, since the PCIE lanes provide 65-75 watts and the power cables can provide ~108 watts

I suspect it has been pointed out but 75w is also provided by the PCIe bus. That being said I have for sure melted SATA to PCIe power adapters on that same Dell you showed and a Radeon R9 270...

The problem is that 54W is the max total combined that one sata power string will support according to spec, not 54W per connector. Fine for storage drives, not fine if using sata to 6 pin for mining.or any other high power stuff.

Try to get an R9 295X2 and test two of these adapters with this card :) I´m pretty sure that that wont end well.

Been using that adapter for many month, still live.

Maybe try in case so the airflow isn't nearly as well and more hot air actually builds up.

Never not laughing at or with your videos good job mate

4:15 Even if the gpu were to be using 100 watts, it would only use half of what ONE sata connector can actually do, since the PCI slot carries 75 watts, which makes it totally reasonable for it not being that warm. I would personally not use that solution; but if I had to, I'd choose a GPU that has a TDP of less than 120watts, which would mean that I use only half of what it can pull from both of the sata ports.

Hey Dawid! I just want to thank you for talking about this. A year ago, I put together a 600 dollar system, and I used one of these adapters. I think this might have broken my GPU, causing my system to fail. If you're building a PC, please never use this adapter! It could cost you hundreds of dollars!

I think you missed that PCIe x16 alone is able to deliver up to 75 watts to the card

i was more concerned about the optiplex motherboard, because it has board level voltage regulation. means the powersupply only gives 12v and it gets converted to all other voltages on the motherboard itself. you could clearly have overloaded the regulators. i dont think they considderd that someone puts a gaming gpu in it.