so today i got an AMD BC-250 and a PSU for it. this will become a live thread of me not knowing wtf am i doing

first issue: i am not managing to turn on the PSU. little me didn’t get a power switch so i am trying to connect PS_ON to ground with a paperclip and currently not succeeding

praying i don’t fry it on day 1

so apparently the PSU turns on when unplugged to the BC-250, so the jumper works. but not when it’s plugged in. why

@nay how did you connect it? note that it needs a PCIE 8pin connector and NOT the "CPU" connector, they look similar but the pinout is different

also how powerful is the PSU? it can pull a significant spike on boot supposedly

@anthropy i just noticed i was plugging the CPU connector :)

so i almost fried the card but fortunately it didn’t happen and figured it out now, it’s working!

almost fried the card on day 1 award

@nay it's a common mistake! luckily usually good PSUs will note the resistance is wrong and refuse to start

@anthropy glad mine did lol

@nay nice! keep an eye on the temperature, that block is usually meant to be used with forced air cases that push air through from front to back, usually people put one of those centrifugal fans on it iirc, but it should at least boot for now, just be careful with heavy loads (200w worth heat to dispose of)

@nay that is an unusual computer. how are you planning to cool it?

@noisytoot hopes and dreams

@noisytoot i don’t have any cooling for it atm aside of a small USB fan on top. so i should figure out what to do about this

somehow this was less eventful than expected. it’s been running fine and is just pending a case/proper cooling for it to be properly used

@nay I should also figure out what to do about cooling my power9 server (it does have cooling, but it sounds like a jet engine and will have to be in my bedroom). I was planning on getting some larger fans and taping them to the front with a cardboard funnel, but I'd need to figure out how to power them (I'm not sure if it's a standard fan connector, the fans are hot-swappable and certainly in a nonstandard form-factor) and even the PSU fans are annoying (they're tiny 1U fans, and I'm pretty sure every compatible PSU I could get to replace it would have equally annoying fans (it has two 1.4kW 1U PSUs, but only one is required and it probably won't actually use quite that much power unless I do something like filling all the PCIe slots with GPUs))

(but I will worry about that later, first I need to get it booting at all)