Originally Posted by DesT My dell psu just isnt cutting it, I want to switch to maybe a 400wt psu. I heard somewhere that it might fry my mobo...would it? I think it has a 250wt now, if it cant handle 400wt, what do you recommend?

Originally Posted by DesT Its a dell 2400, do you think it would be ok?

I don’t make the adapters for the power supply. The good news is you can make your own for about $10.00.

I received an E-mail from a very helpful Dell upgrader regarding the power connections. At http://www.cablesonline.net/powercables.html there is an ATX power extender for the lovely price of $3.00, and an AT power extension for $3.00. There is no picture, but this is just what I’ve been looking for. I might order one some day and post a pictorial “how to” on making one of these work for your Dell power supply. In the meantime, these couple of pictures will have to do. It can be done without any special tools at all, and I’ll let each interested Dell upgrader make his/her own, since I’d rather not do it and wouldn’t like the liability of messing with a power supply. That was also my intention with the front panel connectors, but there didn’t seem to be a good way to do it, so I decided to make some.

Here’s a photo of the power supply upgrade sent to me by a resourceful Dell owner (thanks, Jim). He bought the ATX power extender and the AT extender. You just need the one connection and the wires from the AT connector to plug in the extra little Dell (3.3v) connection. Looking at the photo below, the right side plugs into the Dell power supply and the left side plugs into your new motherboard. You basically cut all the wires in half on the ATX extension and then use half the AT extension and splice everything back together the right way. Fun huh? You could use the same power extenders and adapt a Dell motherboard to a standard ATX power supply. You’d just use the other end of the AT connector and reverse the ATX plugs.

Here’s his drawing of the splice job. Notice that space 19 is not used on the Dell connector, but is used on the ATX connector. This means you can’t simply cut and splice your Dell power plug, since you’d be short pin 19. You will have to use the ATX extender to do this modification or buy a terminal and a crimping tool to get wire 19 into the Dell connector. The small words you can’t read say “Dell”, “ATX”, and “Aux” (that’s the little 3.3v connector on the Dell). You can see that circuits 1 and 3 get spliced together on the Dell end, and then those two wires get spliced into circuit 4 on the standard ATX plug. If you look at the diagrams HERE , you can see that those are the +5v wires. I think you should be able to figure out the rest. You can go HERE to see my diagrams and some photos of the Dell and standard ATX connector.

Once again, I do not make these power supply adapters. You make your own or buy a new power supply.