i sell both powered and non powered and when people ask for suggestions i always tell them 4 or more power 3 and under you should be fine with non powered. if you cant get the extender to work then you have a motherboard with a hot swapable 1x port and you need to bridge 2 pins so the motherboard recognizes the x16 card as they arent set up quite the same as a 1x device. alot of motherboards also have problems using 1x to 16 risers on x16 slots. ive sold these on ebay and and never had a customer email me with a problem after i give them that advice. you can make powered out of non powered and if you do i would attach both the + and - to the molex as current flows from the - to the + so just having + on the molex isnt really doing anything but bringing the current into the psu after it goes threw the gpu. Still drawing power threw the motherboard.