Skyhawk Power One Power Supply - Cables and Audio
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The modular cables that come with the Power One include a few different types. There are two that carry two molex connecters and a floppy 3 pin, one with three 4 pin ports, one with two SATA power connecters, and finally a cable with a 6 pin connecter meant for boards using PCIe. All of these can be used at once; for each cable, there is a point to plug it in.
In addition to these, there is a 24 pin ATX cable, meant for both servers and the newer Intel motherboards based on the 925XE chipset. This is future proofing, as eventually all desktop systems are going to move to a similar connector, especially the dual core models. There is also the now ubiquitous 4pin 12V connecter, and one other Molex that seems out of place. This one is for a special feature specific to the model of the Power One we are looking at today. What it is used for is powering an optical drive and outputting music without the rest of the system being on.
I've seen this before on various SFF systems, but never as a feature on a PSU. I'm not quite sold on the idea, at least not as an audiophile. For someone who doesn't leave their PC on 24/7, this probably isn't going to be seen as much of a feature, but to people who mostly use their computer to play audio CDs as opposed to iTunes or other similar programs, it might be useful in order to reduce power consumption and reduce the ambient noise of having all of the system fans going.
The main issues I have with this from a user aspect are two fold: one, it requires that you have a CD-ROM drive with forward/backward and play/stop buttons on the front of it. I don't know of many current drives which have this feature; it seems to have died a natural death a while ago. Surfing through Newegg, I could find two manufacturers who did have CD-RW models using those buttons (ASUS and BenQ), but none with DVD burners.
Luckily I have an old CDROM drive left over from my SUN Ultra10 workstation before I put a DVD drive in it, which has these buttons on it. Using this, I was able to test out the feature. The other parts of it, besides the power cable, include an analog out cable that attaches to both the CD drive and to a PCI slot plate, which has a mini-stereo port on it for attaching to things like 1/8" headphones or most typical computer speakers.
This is the point where the whole thing starts to really fall apart for me. I use the S/PDIF optical port on my sound card to feed my A/V receiver, which then powers my speakers. I plug my headphones into a high end DAC on the soundcard outputting 96KHz upsampled audio. Going with this design is quite the step down in audio quality from what my ears are used to handling. I think Skyhawk did know what they were doing, though; most consumers aren't nearly as demanding in audio applications as I am, and would be fine with plugging a pair of low end speakers into the port.
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