How to spot sense pin on gpu 6pin power cable?

[adelage]

Hello,
It might sound like a stupid question, if it wasn't that I have a psu where the 6pin plug wires have been cut, so now I am not able to spot which of the 3 ground wires is the sense cable that allows the gpu to recognise the connector, and I can't rewire it...is there any way to do it with a multimeter?

 

[clutchc]

You should be able to power up the PSU and ID the +12 and common (ground) at the wire ends. As far as the "sense" wire, I don't believe there is one coming from the PSU. It's just 3 x +12 (yel) and 3 x common (blk). The sensing is done at the gfx card. Feel free to prove me wrong, of course.

 

[adelage]

i was pretty sure of the same, until i bumped in this site http://www.overclock.net/a/gpu-and-cpu-power-connections where it looks like one of the three ground is actually a sense wire, now i tried nonetheless to just wire them without caring about it, just soldering the cables with the same color (yellow and black) to a 6pin connector, and plugged a gpu and it booted fine...i also went further bridging two extras ground wire to make a 6+2 gpu connector and tried a rx 480, and even this one booted fine..the only problem now is that when i try to stress the rx 480 with unigine heaven, some annoying coin whining sounds come from the card, but i guess that might be due to the psu not powerful enough (it's a bequiet sfx 350w, and it's already powering a 4770k cpu)..so far no smoke yet though

 

[clutchc]

I didn't see anything in that article that led me to believe the 'sense' wire originates at the PSU. Especially when the author was talking about using Molex connectors with an adapter. But I didn't have time to read the whole thing. I just searched for 'sense' words and read that. I still feel it is the card that does the 'sensing', not the PSU. The card needs to see the (-) wire at the correct position. At least, that's the way I understand it.

As to the coil whine, I suspect you're hearing the PSU, not the GPU. Or maybe the GPU as a result of the PSU. The 350W BeQuiet (while a nice unit) is way to small for the RX-480. RealHardTechX recommends a 500W PSU minimum for that card. I'm kinda surprised it held up w/o shutting down under load.

 

[adelage]

I didn't see anything in that article that led me to believe the 'sense' wire originates at the PSU. Especially when the author was talking about using Molex connectors with an adapter. But I didn't have time to read the whole thing. I just searched for 'sense' words and read that. I still feel it is the card that does the 'sensing', not the PSU. The card needs to see the (-) wire at the correct position. At least, that's the way I understand it.

As to the coil whine, I suspect you're hearing the PSU, not the GPU. Or maybe the GPU as a result of the PSU. The 350W BeQuiet (while a nice unit) is way to small for the RX-480. RealHardTechX recommends a 500W PSU minimum for that card. I'm kinda surprised it held up w/o shutting down under load.

it has been running fine in a few stress tests, of course needs to see how it reacts after a few hours of gaming..anyway I guess you are right, there's no reason to believe that the sense comes from the psu