I've purchased a MSI B450 Carbon pro for my new build and looking at the manual there are 8 PIN and 4 PIN connectors for the CPU. Every power supply i have reviewed (ATX form) only seems to come with an 8 PIN cable but reading around some other forums its not entirely clear if the 4 PIN is required or not for normal use of the motherboard. Does anyone have any experience with this board/situation?
Soldato
You don't need the extra 4 pin power plugged in necessarily. I'm pretty sure that it's mainly there for maximum stability when overclocking the higher core count Ryzen chips (2/3700 and 2/3700X). You can get cables that adapt a spare PCI-E 6pin connector from your PSU to a 4+4pin motherboard connector if you want to connect it. And some higher wattage PSUs do come with a pair of 8pin (or rather 4+4pin) leads for the job.
Soldato
As above it isn't needed. Just plug in the 8 pin and it will be fine. You would only need the extra 4 pin power for extreme overclocking.
Thank you both, thats what I was hoping to here. I'll likely get a modular PSU to give me some flexibility down the track with this in mind
Soldato
It's a good board. Bear in mind that if you're going with a current gen Ryzen (3000 series) you'll almost certainly need to update the BIOS/UEFI before you start. The MSI boards fortunately have a BIOS flashback feature so you can do this without needing to beg/borrow/steal an earlier CPU from somewhere.
Soldato
They should be up to date by now. One other member on here mentioned that board worked fine from here.
Soldato
I wasn't sure if they were shipping the Carbon Pro board updated. I know the Tomahawk got a Max version which is ready to go with Ryzen 3000 series chips.
It's fairly straightforward to sort anyway
Ryzens would need pretty much LN2 cooling to clock past 8-pin EPS12V connector's power rating.
Unless you were just cranking up volts to see how much it takes before CPU goes up in smoke...
And at those power draws VRM components would be desoldering themselves from PCB without liquid cooling for them.
Not all modular PSUs are high quality ones, but pretty much every high quality 10 year warranty PSU comes with modular cables as standard.
And without some extreme cooling you won't ever need that additional 4 pin ATX12V cable, with 8 pin EPS12V connecter officially capable to ~380w.
In case of Ryzens you would need some exoting cooling to push them far enough to need that, becase of manufacturing node hitting steep wall quite fast.
On Intel side it would be easier to push up power draw.
I appear to have been fortunate in that the box has a sticker saying "Ryzen 3000 series desktop ready". I bought it quite accidentally from CCLonline via amazon (I thought when i popped in the basket it was coming from OCUK as seller). I'm probably going to go on trust and get a 3600 over my original pick 2700X especially with the above feedback on the 8 PIN power.