Antec High Current Gamer 620W Modular 80PLUS Bronze PSU Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
2,003 words · ~10 min read
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welcome to my unboxing of the high current gamer M 620 watt from antek so
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this is once again a bit of a departure from anex traditional style of um not
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focusing as much on modular power supplies to the point where now they are
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focusing more on modular power supplies I a huge advocate of modular power
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supplies yes there are drawbacks such as for
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example they are slightly less efficient due to the modular interfaces on the
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inside although there have been advances there as well as due to the cable
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connections that will slightly reduce the efficiency of the power supply
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however I believe the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks so I yes I like
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modular power supplies and I'm happy to see anch move in this Direction with
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their psus this particular unit we're going to find a bunch of in stuff about
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it on the outside so one is that it uses a 135 mm dual ball bearing fan this is
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another huge Improvement that anac has made over the last couple of generations
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where they went from using 80 mil fans on their high-end power supplies to
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using almost all 120 plus millim fans
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thumbs up all an tech power supplies are rated for continuous power so not Peak
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power not burst power not like you know
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fairy dust power continuous power High
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current Cable Management okay that much is is good and fairly evident Universal
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input okay let's find if we can see anything High current output okay 12vt
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single rail very nice single 12vt rail okay ATX this Advanced hybrid Cable
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Management continuous power wow this is all stuff that we've already seen before
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aha Japanese brand
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capacitors it is 80 plus bronze certified which is also kind of nice as
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well so remember 80 plus bronze is a step above 80 plus and a step below 80
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Plus silver so most sort of mid-range power supplies are 80 plus bronze these
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days and the advantage of 80 plus in general the higher you go in terms of 80
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plus remember antec has products ranging all the way up to 80 plus Platinum with
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their High current Pro whoops I dropped
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it high current Pro 1000 uh which has a max efficiency of 94% I mean you can
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hardly call it 80 plus at that point it's more like you know almost 90 plus
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um so you do have a wide of options this is just one of them with 80 plus bronze
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so let's have a look at the unit itself on the side we see pretty much your sort
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of standard like you know it's got a label it has an an teex stamp on it
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actually this has a pretty high quality paint finish on it too that's
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nice it's one of those little things right where it has a bit of a texture to
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it so it's not going to be easy to scratch which is really important because one of the first things that you
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can do to totally bork a power supply is
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go ahead and like install it this way and then realize that oh the cables
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don't reach and then you flip it over install the other way only to realize that the top of it is all covered in
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scratches from putting it in the case so if you have a high quality paint finish
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on the unit then you don't have to worry about that as much I mean you the flip
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side of that is you could just be careful but you know not everyone's
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careful all the time so right label 135
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mm dual ball bearing fan with a very aggressive very high pressure looking uh
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blade design actually that looks just like beastly what kind of fan is there
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it's an Adda fan fascinating that thing looks beautiful
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okay antec design continuous power since 1986 antech is officially about as old
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as I am okay you can see on the other side how would you normally install this
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so oh that's a shame okay so antech hasn't figured out the whole like label
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going the other way thing unfortunately so if you were to install this in a
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bottom mounted system well even if in a top mounted system no matter what if you
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were to install it this way this label would unfortunately be upside down I
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mean I guess you could peel it off and put it back on but you could also put it
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this way all right here we see the general General specs and stats so we
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have up to 48 amps on a single 12vt Rail
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and it's 80 plus bronze this is all stuff that we have pretty much covered already the 12vt max load is 576 Watts
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so that means this particular power supply design does have actual dedicated
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circuitry for the 3.3 volt and 5.5 volt rails it is not just converting 12vt in
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order to get those other voltage outputs now let's have a look at oh you
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know what we didn't even cover the environmentally friendly packaging this
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is one of those things that some people might not care about but personally I think antech is right to be making an
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effort to do this kind of stuff so they have found a way to package almost all
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of their power supplies these days in corrugated cardboard instead of using uh
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Foams that don't biodegrade and will pretty much still be there when your
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grandkids and your great grandkids are throwing away their
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styrofoam hopefully they have a better solution by then but uh yeah and this is
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also made of like a papery material so all of this stuff is relatively
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environmentally friendly when you compare it to super heavy on the
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styrofoam and plastic packaging solutions from
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competitors so we don't have a ton of included cables I wouldn't have minded
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seeing a few more of these but we've got one triple Molex cable and these are all
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hey look at this this is using their um shoot what do they call it hold on I
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have to cheat some kind of like stealth cable
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something or something like that stealth wires yes all wires darkened for minimal
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visibility so antec is all about they're very by the book like as a company these
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guys are just like like by the book kind of rigid I mean not in a bad way but
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what they basically were like is like uh oh well our competitors are doing cables
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with all black wires well we don't believe in that because it's not safe
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because there's a chance at the factory or when an end user is resaving the
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cable or whatever else for these wires to be mixed up now what antech solution
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to that is is wires that are half colored and half black so check this out
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see yellow on the one side black on the other side so what that means is when
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you wrap them in sleeving they look almost pure black because they're only
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half colored compared to having full colored cables inside but antec
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maintains that same standard of safety and consistency that they strive for so
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it's one of it's it's interesting things like that where you know you see that
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that rigidity that unwillingness to to bend on something like a safety standard
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but with the adaptability where they want to go okay but we need to address
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this need in the market for our cables to look nicer so I think that's kind of
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cool it's kind of a neat story when you when you hear about it uh thermal
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manager Advanced low voltage fan control for optimal heat and noise management up
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to 92.9% power available on the 12vt rail but also REM missing here stealth
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wires and Tech quality threeyear limited warranty on all parts and labor as well
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as full Suite of industrial grade protections you can actually I mean if
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you Google around enough you can find plenty of incidents of other brands of
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power supplies just like catastrophically failing um especially
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overcurrent protection is the big one all antech power supplies actually have
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overcurrent protection not all of their competitors even some of the bigger
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names that you might not expect do have over current protection so moving on
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right we have one with three molex's one with three moxes and a floppy in case
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you still have something that uses that whether it's a card reader or whatever else we have a power cable that is
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included nice flexible one seems to be reasonably high quality four
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installation screws wouldn't mind if those were black but I guess it's not the end of the world
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three SATA cables or three SATA connectors on one cable three SATA
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connectors on another more different cable and finally two PCIe 6 plus two
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pin cables so you can connect up to one high-end graphics card or two fairly
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low-end graphics cards like sort of 7770 class we have a 24 pin cable it's
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actually a nice thin thin connector also using their stealth wire so you can see
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that is so much less uh obtrusive than
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than like a more traditional you know what I should look around and I should
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see if I can find like a more traditional approach power
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supply it's like snapping he says this
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one ah yes so that's an ocz ZX Series power
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supply so you can see the wide variety of colors that are available in there
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mind you they've done a pretty good job of sleeving it right to the end anyway
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so okay let's go
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back and moving right along to the last one we have a nice long approximately
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let's see it's about one Linus ARM length uh 4 plus 4 pin so that's good
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for your CPU power connector so this is a 620 W power supply you won't be
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powering any high-end dual Graphics configurations and you won't be powering
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any high-end dual CPU configurations so the one thing I wouldn't mind seeing
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improved is maybe one more uh one more
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SATA connector something along those lines that would be that would be kind
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of nice to see but other than that it's not the end of the world um this is cool
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though check this out so in order to give you lots of options antech has
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allowed you to either go for very few peripherals and four PCIe cables
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although you'd have to Source your own cables okay so check that out so we can
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put in our two PCI cables and then they've given you this sort of
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modularity where you can go okay well hey what if I only have one graphics
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card but I want to have like four peripheral connectors well what you can
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do is you can plug them in here or you can plug them in here so they give you
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the option to use the connectors the modular the modular sockets for
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whichever cables you want which is pretty neat on the back we find your
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traditional honeycomb as well as your onoff switch and your power input and I
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think that pretty much covers it thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the high current gamer M
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from antech this is the 620 watt version although this is available in a couple
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of different wattage capacities don't forget to subscribe to lineus Tech tips
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