An "always on" computer

[ELItheICEman]

Hi guys, I work for a video game company and I have a quick question. We have a game (Deal or no Deal to be precise) that the core (PC) doesn't start up sometimes when power is applied to cabinet. This irritates my boss to no end and I would like to come up with a permanent solution. One stipulation is I don't want to mod the pc very much because we may have to send it back to our distributor someday. My idea was to use a ATX 20 pin extender that I salvaged and short the green wire to ground on the plug that goes to the psu. Of course I know this works because everyone at some time has used one for a power supply (guilty I use one on my bench ) ) My question is, is this any different when a motherboard is in the equation? I wasn't going to connect the green wire through to the motherboard, is there any reason not to do this? And yes the motherboard is set to boot up after power loss in the BIOS. Thx!

[mariushm]

Re: An "always on" computer

The green wire is for a signal from the motherboard to go to the power supply and tell it to start... but the motherboard is supposed to send that signal only when the power supply sends 3.3v or 5v with a reasonable ripple on some of the wires... or simply put when the motherboard notices the power supply is "initialized" and ready to deliver the power required.

If you short the green wire to ground, the power supply will always start but I think there may be some special cases which you wouldn't want to happen... like maybe losing power and then when power comes back getting 130v on the 110v for a couple of seconds... if that's the case you may send 6-7v on the 5v and 13-15v on the 12v for a second, which may damage the board. It probably depends on the power supply also.

[b700029]

Re: An "always on" computer

What brand of PSU is it? Maybe bad caps on the 5VSB are causing this problem.