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April 1st, 2015 14:00

Optiplex 7020 mid-tower, power supply upgrade?

Some of our end user's are located as far as perhaps 75 feet away from their actual computer/chassis. They have keyboard/mouse/LCD  at the "remote" end. The PC chassis is in a different location.

So we utilize  passive "USB-to-CAT6 extenders". What ended up happening with previous model dells; Optiplex 780,790 or 7010's, equipped with dell oem power supplies, was that the USB devices on the remote end became erratic in their behavior.

It took almost a week of troubleshooting with USB Bus analyzers to discover that the problem with erratic USB behavior was that the Passive USB extenders required more power/current than a dell oem P/S could offer.

So the fix with previous dell models, including optiplex 780's, 790's and 7010's was to remove the dell oem P/S and install a COTS 500-watt or higher Power supply. Then USB devices became rock solid in their behavior. We were good to go.:emotion-2:

Today I encountered my first 7020 mid [mini?] tower with some new 8-pin power supply. :emotion-39:

Is this same power supply being used in other Optiplex mid towers as well?

Are there any optiplex models that still maintain the 24-pin ATX standard?

Thanks in advance.

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54.2K Posts

April 6th, 2015 12:00

When comparing the Optiplex 3020/7020/9020/XE2, all of the motherboards have the 8 pin P1 power connector. None of them have the 24 pin P1 connector. I do not where you can find 3rd party power supplies that offer this 8 pin P1 power lead.

11 Posts

April 16th, 2015 15:00

Does this 8-pin motherboard connection adhere to any type of an industry standard?

Or is this 8-pin power supply some sort of a "dell proprietary" design?

I recall that about 10 or 12 years ago, dell modified their power supply's ATX 20-pin motherboard connector so that you could plug in a COTS power supply. [Yikes]                                                           Some dell owners found out the hard way that buying a COTS P/S at Bestbuy and installing it would, could and did destroy their motherboard. [this was even mentioned in an Oreilly press PC book].

Back then  a company called PC Power and Cooling began building power supplies based upon the dell proprietary design. So I sought them out, to see if they had optiplex 7020 compatible power supplies. The PC Power and Cooling company had been bought out by OCZ, followed  by Firepower Technology, but I finally got in touch with them. They unfortunately did not offer any upgrades for the optiplex 7020.

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