SOLVED Power for Radeon HD 6970 on my new build - Molex vs. PCIe

I'm working on my first build project, and I have a question about connecting power to the Radeon HD697: The power input on the card is a combination of an 8 pin 6 pin; the included adapter pulls that power from 3 molex plugs, but the main dongle on my PSU has 2 PCIe connectors, each is 6 pin and has a little two pin dongle hanging off the side; can I use two of the 6pins and 1 of the 2pin connectors from that main cable and avoid using a full modular Molex cable to power the card (I have a single rail PSU so I don't think it will really matter where I get the power).

The arrangements seems to work - the 6 + 2 in the 8 pin and 6 pin in the 6 pin, but I'm concerned because of the arrangement of the connector that came with the card - two of the pins are daisy chained together, which makes me think it's a bit different than what I'm proposing to do.

Thanks for helping out the newb; this site has been invaluable as I've been making decisions and building this system.

My Build:
Antec 902 v3
MSI 890fxa-GD70
AMD Phenon II x6 1100t Black Edition
Sapphire Radeon HD 6970
16gig Kingston HyperX DDR3 1600
2 WD Black Caviar 7200 6gps HDD (1x1.5tb, 1x750gb)
Rosewill Lightning 1000w PSU
Various optical drives

always use the pci-e cables, its just less clutter and 1 less set of connections to go wrong

The 6+2 +6 won't cause any problems? I'm very happy to have fewer cables to sleeve and hide, just don't want to fry my brand new video card.

Thanks again!

Sabotage22 said:

The 6+2 +6 won't cause any problems? I'm very happy to have fewer cables to sleeve and hide, just don't want to fry my brand new video card.

Thanks again!

Click to expand...

the 6+2 pin plug is so it can provide 8pin pcie power and be backwards compatible with 6 pin slots, quite a nice feature

Thanks! I'll give it a try this weekend; got everything up and running yesterday (build day) -- I'll be doing some cable management tonight and tomorrow.

Really appreciate the feedback.

Just an update -- worked like a charm, and I was able to completely remove one of the modular plugs. Case looks MUCH better now. Between that and sleeving 3 or 4 cables, I'm down to just a case fan switch that won't reach nicely, and needing to extend the CPU power so that I can hide it better.

Thanks again.

I'm sorry to dig this up, but I have a similar issue and I'm having a little trouble visualizing the proper configuration.

My ASUS 6970 came with an 8 pin connector which splits into two 6 pin connectors. I have one PCIe 6-pin connector coming from the PSU (Corsair HX-650) which splits into two 6-pins. These two 6-pins fit into the two 6-pins on the adapter and the 8-pin fits into one of the connectors on the card.

Then I have a second PCIe cable running straight from the PSU into the card with a 6-pin connector, making a total of 14 pins.

Is this correct?

Yes - my PSU has two 6 pin PCIe power connectors, each of which as an additional 2 pins hanging off to the side (so essentially I have 2 8 pin PCIe connectors) I use both six pins, and then one of the two pins -- so your would have a six pin and an eight pin. Should work fine -- it cleaned up my case a bunch.