I am thinking of building a Socket A PC. If a Socket A board has a 4-pin 12v "CPU power connector" in addition to the 20-pin ATX power connector, will the CPU (say a ~50watt Athlon 1GHz) use the 12v rail, or is there some other reason why these boards have the separate 4-pin power connector?
In general nForce2 motherboards with the 4-pin connector will draw all the power for the CPU from the +12V line, but I've heard that on some other Socket A boards this is not the case and the CPU still mostly pulls from +5V despite the connector being there.
Are you talking about any motherboard in particular?
> or is there some other reason why these boards have the separate 4-pin power connector?
It was *only* to feed the CPU vrms AKAIK.
I'm looking at cheapo boards
MSI MS-6786 (OEM) with a KM400A Chipset
PC CHIPS M825 with KM266/8235 Chipset
