12VO Power Standard Appears To Be Gaining Steam, Will Reduce PC Cables and Costs

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: The 12VO power standard (PDF), developed by Intel, is designed to reduce the number of power cables needed to power a modern PC, ultimately reducing cost. While industry uptake of the standard has been slow, a new slew of products from MSI indicates that 12VO is gaining traction.

MSI is gearing up with two 12VO-compliant motherboards, covering both Intel and AMD platforms, and a 12VO Power Supply that it's releasing simultaneously: The Pro B650 12VO WiFi, Pro H610M 12VO, and MSI 12VO PSU power supply are all 'coming soon,' which presumably means they'll officially launch at CES 2024. HardwareLux got a pretty good look at MSI's offerings during its EHA (European Hardware Awards) tech tour, including the 'Project Zero' we covered earlier. One of the noticeable changes is the absence of a 24-pin ATX connector, as the ATX12VO connectors use only ten-pin connectors. The publications also saw a 12VO-compliant FSP power supply in a compact system with a thick graphics card.

A couple of years ago, we reported on FSP 650-watt and 750-watt SFX 12VO power supply. Apart from that, there is a 1x 6-pin ATX12VO termed 'extra board connector' according to its manual and a 1x 8-pin 12V power connector for the CPU. There are two smaller 4-pin connectors that will provide the 5V power needed for SATA drives. It is likely each of these connectors provides power to two SATA-based drives. Intel proposed the ATX12VO standard several years ago, but adoption has been slow until now. This standard is designed to provide 12v exclusively, completely removing a direct 3.3v and 5v supply. The success of the new standard will depend on the wide availability of the motherboard and power supplies.

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