HEC WinPower 480 W Power Supply

Power Distribution

In Figure 14, you can see WinPower 480 W label stating all its power specs.

Figure 14: Power supply label.

This unit has two +12 V rails, distributed like this:

• +12V1 (solid yellow wire): Main motherboard cable, peripheral power
  connectors, SATA power connectors and half ATX12V connector.
• +12V2 (yellow with blue stripe wire): Video card auxiliary power cable and half ATX12V connector.

From the previous page we came with some maximum theoretical numbers for the +12V output (343 W), +5 V (214 W) and +3.3 V (141 W).

As we mentioned earlier the maximum current/power each line can really deliver will depend on other components, especially the transformer, the coil, the wire gauge and even the width of the printed circuit board traces used.

For the +12 V output HEC stated 17 A for +12V1 and 16 A for +12V2. This would give a 204 W and 192 W, respectively, or 396 W.

For the + 5 V output HEC stated a 35 A maximum current, which translates to 175 W, while for the +3.3 V output the manufacturer stated a 30 A maximum current, or 99 W. On the label, however, HEC says that the combined power of +3.3 V and +5 V outputs is of 220 W (since they are connected to the same transformer output).

Unfortunately we don’t have the necessary equipment to make a true power supply review; we would need to create a real 480 W load to check if this power supply could deliver its labeled power or not.