Hi, I've bought a case and motherboard, but the PSU included with the case only has 20 pins (and a seperate 4 pin connector). I was thinking of trying to connect the 20 pin, plus the 4 pin, to the 24pin socket on my motherboard, but I'm sure I recall a 4-pin slot on the motherboard, so I thought the 4 pin connector on the PSU goes in there. Will the 20 pin plus the 4 pin connectors work on my board? Or will it fry it? If the 4 pin connector is for something else, can I just connect the 20 pin, leaving 4 free slots on the socket? Thanks.

The 4 pin is for CPU power, you need a 24pin ATX PSU.....

Oh no :( And there's no way around it? I read on some other site that it won't harm if I leave the 4 remaining slots on the board free, but I don't want to risk frying my board.

I don't have schematics in front of me but have spliced in connectors before, BUT don't do it to your ATX connector.I've read about leaving them out too, never tried it. I think only way would be that you've not noticed that the 4 pin interlocks to the 20 pin. Alot of new PSUs are universal. By that I mean the white plastic has a channel on it that slides into the other, thus converting it to a 24 pin. BUT if it is the standard extra 4 pin square of 2 yellow and two black they won't jive with the 20 pin. The yellow is 12 volt and the blacks are ground, you can cut and splice them to run a case fan or dress up lights if you need more 12 volt power supplies. What's your PSU box wattage and what wattage are you wanting? correct me if I'm wrong

Cheers for the reply. Well, the extra four pin plug has 2 black wires and 2 yellow, so it seems it won't work :( I'm tempted to try and just use 20 pins in the 24 pin socket. I have a 350watt PSU, and in my PC I hope to have a 250gb SATA hard-drive, a DVD-Writer and DVD-ROM, an Nvidia Geforce 7300, an Athlon 64 3800 and 1gb of RAM. Is the power supply sufficient for them?

They make adapters to go from 20 PSUs to 24 pin motherboards. About $3.00 at Newegg.com. A 350 watt PSU sounds marginal for your machine. Unless it (your present PSU) is a top quality one, I'd advise you to buy a good quality (minimum $30.00) 24 pin PSU rather than buying an adapter.

Thanks for the reply. The PSU I got now is also extremely noisy, so I'm going to follow your suggestion and buy a new 24 pin PSU, hopefully a low-noise one.