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RE: Nonsense. There will be no damage. Just try it

It is possible that sending 6 volts to devices that expect 12 volts may cause them to fail. The possibilities are smoke, burned out parts, or data corruption leading to downstream system crashes, etc... If you are a reviewer for a PC magazine and trying to stress test a new product to see how robust it is, then this might be fun. Otherwise it's a bad idea. You might get away with it or you might not. It might work a few times and the next time might be terrible. I would follow fmak's advice in this regard.

As one example, let's say that you have a DC-DC converter that is designed to accept 12 volts and output some other voltage at a certain power level. Let's say that the converter has been sized by the corporate bean counters to just barely have enough margin to operate safely at the rated voltage. When you lower the voltage down to 6 volts if the converter can still output the correct voltage it will have to draw twice the input current and the parts involved may overheat, burn up or conceivably catch fire. Or the converter could be well engineered and shut down in an orderly fashion with no hardware or software impact. (One would expect this behavior in a mil-spec or aerospace grade system, but mass market PCs aren't over built. The engineers work for the bean counters.)

I have no idea why you see 6 volts on the case on on 3.3 voltage busses. It could be a measurement problem. I would hope so for your sake, because if you put 6 volts on parts that expect 3.3 volts expect magic smoke.

Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar


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