pico power?

[Superdad]

Look at the cable harness pictured with the PicoPSU (http://www.mini-box.com/picoPSU-160-XT) and you will see that the 12V input (from external LPS of course) is passed through to the motherboard (on the 20/24 pin connector and on the  CPU 4-pin) completely unadulterated.

 

What many of our (JS-2) clients do is install another DC-barrel jack at the back panel of their PC and have it run directly to the main critical 5V device—the SATA drive.

 

All motherboards are loaded with DC-DC switching regulators anyway (most of the chips run off 1.1V or 3.3V), so the couple of extra DC-DC converters on a PicoPSU module are quite benign. Such switching regs are unavoidable—and they are not to be equated with a switch-mode power supply (whose primary evil is anyway not noise but rather high AC leakage).

[Superdad]

19 minutes ago, TubeMan said:

Much better than Pico

 

https://www.hdplex.com/hdplex-400w-hi-fi-dc-atx-power-supply-16v-24v-wide-range-voltage-input.html

 

It is a fine product. And yet it takes 19V input and converts that to 12V (and other voltages) using, guess what: DC-DC switching regulators. 

[Superdad]

13 minutes ago, the_doc735 said:

exactly!...

..."BUT!" ~ input is "16V-24V wide range voltage input support", where do you get the 19V from?

 

Their previous converter boards were always 19V, and the output of their ATX LPS meant to be used with this new board is 19V.  Regardless, the 16-24V is all stepped down with DC-DC switching regulators as I said.  Not a terrible thing mind you; I just wanted to put it into perspective versus the 12V pass-through of a PicoPSU used with a 12V LPS.