Powering CCFLs from my case's LED hub?

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Jul 27, 2015
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Greetings! I just build my first custom water cooled system in Phanteks Enthoo Primo and wanted to use the LED toggle switch of the case to switch on and off two cold cathodes. The LED hub of the case gets its power from a 12V SATA connector and has 6 2pin outputs (for fans with separate LED connectors), 2 2pin connectros that plug into the 2 integrated LED strips of the case and one female molex connector that is supposed to power an LED strip. The female molex connector has 2 of the 4 wires connected and they are red and black, however, they are connected to pins 1 and 2 and according to wiki the red one is supposed to be 12V (yellow by convention). I guess I'm not too bothered about it, cause the pump I'm using also needs 12V and has those same wires (or the corresponding ones on the male connector) and they are again red and black instead of yellow and black.
My cold cathodes have a molex connector (dual male/female) which also has those same matching wires (correctly colour coded to be yellow and black). So I should be able to power the cathodes from the LED strip lead of the case's LED hub instead of the power supply, right? The cathodes do come with an on/off switch - basically ground wire goes to ground of the 2 pin input of the black box (is it called inverter?) and the 12V wire goes to the switch; the other wire coming from the switch goes to the + input of the black box and depending on the switch position it either bridges it to an empty connector (ground basically) or to the 12V wire from the molex connector. I thought of removing the switch and just resolder the 12V from the molex into the + input of the CCFL, and then the molex goes into the LED hub and is toggled from there. According to my cases manual, the molex lead can power up to 50 LEDs that draw <1A current. And according to the cold cathode specifications, at 12V they need 3W of power, so they draw 0.25A, so all of what I want to do should work, correct? Just want to double check that I won't damage the LED hub of the case.
 
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That all sounds legit to me, provided the case doesn't do anything funky with the power lines, i.e. as long as the switches simply connect the power straight through.
 
That all sounds legit to me, provided the case doesn't do anything funky with the power lines, i.e. as long as the switches simply connect the power straight through.

Thanks for confirming - I just tried it and it worked!
 
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