High Current Pro 1200W Modular Power Supply Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
2,894 words · ~14 min read
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today we're going to be having a look at NC's Uber EST power supply ever this is
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the high current Pro 1200 watt it is an
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SLI ready yeah duh SLI ready 80 plus
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gold certified 1200 wat power supply so
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the first thing we're going to do is start ripping open the packaging and
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then we're going to show you the packaging then we're going to take off
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the box and then we're going to show you the product itself actually I lied today
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we're going to open the box right away because I'm actually really excited to
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see this thing this is from everything that I've
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seen pretty much the king of power supplies right now all right the first
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thing we're going to find inside is the hcp 1200 product overview most of the
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information here appears to be already on the outside of the box so um you know
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you can decide whether you want to read the documentation inside the box or the
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documentation outside the box now anex packaging I have to admit felt a little
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flimsy to me initially but now I can see
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why they're doing that the reason that it felt that way is because they've
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actually packed it using environmentally friendly cardboard so they've gone with
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two double walled layers of cardboard on all sides of the power supply it fits
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together like a little puzzle so if we go ahead and pull the whole thing out
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you can see that's how it goes together and so realistically it's going to
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provide adequate protection ction versus something like foam but it's also a lot
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less damaging to the environment CU it doesn't take so long to break down in a
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landfill or wherever else it happens to be it's also completely recyclable so it
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shouldn't end up in a landfill I guess that's uh an equally valid point all
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right first thing let's do accessories we've got the power cable which as you
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can see is thick this thing is huge I'm
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just going to try and find uh the yes 14
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AWG but it is a normal Power cable so it
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doesn't use that special connector that we saw on the Quattro 1200 OC all right
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we've got four black screws for mounting it in your case I like those little
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touches black screws just have slightly
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better fit and finish overall when you're doing a really nice build than
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silver ones especially if you're using a black case which most of the high-end
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ones these days are all right in here we have some modular cables I don't know if
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I mentioned already but this power supply does have cable management or
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modular cables all right so why don't we show
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the yeah let's no let's show the power supply first and then we'll show the
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modular cables I did want to cover some of the stuff that ante has to say for
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themselves on the box here so I'm just going to put the box back together and
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show you guys this side first all right so it has Universal input that means
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there's no little switch all right it has eight 6 plus two pin connectors so
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that means up to four high-end graphics cards it's ult multicore ready High
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current output 30 amps time 8 so it has eight 12vt rails that are rated at 30
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amps for their overcurrent protection mind you I've seen this power supply
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tested providing up to 40 amps on one rail so it looks like they've built in a
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fair bit of wiggle room for any kind of uh improvements to Hardware that make it
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draw more power on one rail like say for example even higher-end graphics cards
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that are coming all right uh oh right 128 volt okay that's what I said and
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then we've also got two 8 Pin power connectors so that means that we're
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certified for EPS 12vt 2.92 one of them
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is a 4 plus4 and the other one is a straight 8 Pin so you can run
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motherboards like the VGA sr2 we've got industrial grade protection 880 mm pwm
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fan don't be afraid of the 80 mm fan antech actually specifically calls out
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on the other side of their box the way that they have the profile set up for
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this fan is such that up until you hit about 50 to 60% load it's going to stay
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at like pretty much NE negligible 500 to
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1,000 RPM that is not going to be Audible and by the time you're ramping
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up to the point where I mean remember 50% to 60% load on this power supply is
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600 to 800 watts we're we're talking
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like major major power draws so by the time you're actually pulling 1,000 Watts
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out of the power supply and it starts to get loud there's probably something else
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in your rig that's making noise too it's rated for continuous power like every
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single antec power supply on the market not Peak power although I have
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seen I have actually seen firsthand
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experiences with this power supply pulling eight or providing 1,800 watts
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of power so uh never mind continuous power 1200 watt it can provide a lot
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more than that active power factor correction okay we've got Japanese
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branded capacitors we've got the uh uh
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oh yeah eup 201010 certification so that's pretty cool 28 pin CPU I already
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talked about that hybrid Cable Management talked about that and DC to
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DC architecture which is mostly interesting to uh PSU Geeks but what it
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basically means is that the power for the 5vt and 3.3 volt rails actually
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comes from the 12volt rail just being
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adapted rather than having dedicated circuitry for those it's a it's it is a
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good approach there's a reason they put it on the side of the box so let's see
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the power supply itself it actually kind of reminds me of uh some of their other
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high-end products so the antech logo is similar to the one you find on like the
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1200 gaming case all right I don't know whether it's going to be visible in your
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case depending on how you mount it yeah probably actually so you'll either see
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it this way or if you mount it the other way around in your case you're going to
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see all of those fancy specs so actually I want the cameraman to come have a look
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you can see all 12vt rails are here they are all rated at a maximum of 30 amps
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and a minimum of 0 amps you can see that the 12vt rails combined are capable of
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1,188 Watts or 99 amps and then they've
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actually broken out the 5 Vol 3.3 volt and the other sort of less important
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rails into a separate little chart here
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we've also got the 80 plus gold certification here as well as a couple
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different languages for all the information that we find all right let's
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move around to the side so you can see antech has cleverly made it so that no
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matter how you mount this power supply in your case whether it's this way or oh
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no okay well it looks like antec really intends for you to mount it this way
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because it's going to be right side up for your sticker you're going to be able to see this and you're going to hide the
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sticker with all of the little random information on it on the bottom so
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that's probably going to be optimal here at the back we find a oh okay so that's
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an 80 mm San sanoi fan Sano Deni fans
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are renowned for being the highest quality especially when you're under
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bolting they're not going to get any ticking or buzzing noises that are going
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to be bothersome so I would expect this power supply to be very very quiet up
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until the point where the fan really starts ramping up we've got a power
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switch as well as our power cable input here and then around to the other side
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we've got a Grill at the front you can actually kind of see inside I'm going to
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try and get you guys some more light to see in there but this power supply uses
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a dual PCB design so there's actually a PCB on the top of the unit as well as a
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PCB on the bottom of the unit that gives them a lot more room to do soldering
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rather than having one PCB at the bottom and it also allows them to effectively
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lay out the components internally so there's very little air resistance for
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the 80 mil fan so anc's philosophy is that with an efficient internal layout
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you don't need to really pump the RPMs up on the fan in order to draw a lot of
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air flow through and cool the components you can actually see clear through to
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the to my fingers on the other side can you see that through the camera yeah you
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can so that's why even though it's spinning at a low RPM it's able to
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effectively move air through the unit so let's have a look at the pre-attached
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cables and then we will go ahead and take a look at those modular cables as
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well these are a bit of a challenge for me but I'll figure it
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out yeah there we go okay sorry so the
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first bundle is going to have our 20 plus four pin that is a 24 pin connector
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okay you can see it's actually sleeved um pretty nicely okay antech sleeving
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hasn't been my favorite sometimes in the past but uh cuz I mean especially on the
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Quattro 1200 they had those uh those capacitors here so they had like kind of
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weird uh lumps on all the cables so this is quite a bit better all right next
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we've got the eight pin as well as the 4
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plus 4 pin so that's either dual eight pin or single eight pin plus a four pin
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all right and then oh we've got another bundle here so it has quite a lot of
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pre-attached cables and I hear people criticizing that sometimes however I'm
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going to give you guys a bit of a different philosophy on what I think of
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lots of pre-attached cables on a 1200 W power supply because I think it's just
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fine because if you have a 1200 W power supply Fly and You're not running at
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least a 24 pin a single eight pin and
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then oh man this is taking me forever to remove I'm sorry guys and then a couple
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of high-end graphics cards so four 6 plus two pins then you probably don't
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need a 1200 W power supply because if you're not running two graphics cards
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there's pretty much no justification for it whatsoever so in this other bundle
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we're going to find a 6 plus2 pin another 6 plus2 pin once again these are
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fully sleeved even the in between lengths okay and then we have another 6
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plus2 pin as well as a 6 plus2 pin I also want to take a second and show you
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guys how ante labels those 8 12vt rails
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so you can see that the 12vt rail is clearly labeled on the side of the
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connector for these PCIe all right so we've got actually up to 30 amps
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according to the rated specification for the power supply per graphics card
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because every 6 plus2 pin harness okay
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so see each each two are actually on their own 12vt Rail and that also goes
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for the modular connectors which I'll show you in a minute so the other
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pre-attached cables once again I don't mind this because it's only uh three
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Molex odds are you need at least a couple MOX for any kind of build that
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you're doing and then three SATA cables so after that we've got modular cables
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and I'm going to show you actually something that I really like about this power supply in just a moment so the
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first one we got here we go so you can see this one's actually not labeled in
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terms of the 12vt rail you know what I should check oh yeah yeah look look look
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even the 24 pin as well as the uh 8 Pin
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and the 4 plus 4 pin also have labels and each CPU connector has its own
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12volt rail as well all right uh here we
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go so these are not labeled however they are labeled on the power supply
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themselves so 12v 7 12v 8 all right so
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those are where you're going to be able to plug in up to an additional four PCIe
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6 plus 2 pin connectors so that is to say you can have four GTX 580s running
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off of this power supply with no sweat
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whatsoever pretty crazy all right so
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here we go we've got a SATA connector
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here we've got a SATA here we got SATA
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here all right let's have a look at what we got included so let's say you're doing a fairly modern build you're not
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running a ton of Molex devices you have up to three more modular connectors so
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you can plug in another three of these SATA cables which each have three so
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that is up to 12 SATA devices so you could run you know Blu-ray Drive DVD
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drive and then like a 10 Drive rate array or something directly off the
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power supply with zero adapters if you so desired if you don't need so much
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SATA you've also got two MOX modular cables so ante is giving you the option
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to install whatever it is that you need one of them is three Molex and the other
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one is three Mox and one floppy connector so if you actually still need
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one of these yes they have provided one on one of the modular cables now here's
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a really cool thing let's say you've only got two graphics cards but you need
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all 12 SATA connectors and you need all n nine Molex connectors well here's a
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neat one you can take these ones out and then
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you can go ahead and plug a Molex one
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into here look at that bam that simple so that also gives you
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the ability to run peripherals off another 12volt rail because the way the
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power supply is set up by default okay I'm going to try and find you a mo X
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yeah okay these ones aren't labeled and these aren't labeled but all of the
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peripheral connectors so the ones that are pre-attached SATA and Molex as well
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as all three of the uh HDD labeled
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modular connectors are running off 12vt 4 now remember that's 30 amps that's a
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lot for water cooling pumps fans hard drives basic stuff you'd have to have a
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lot of stuff hooked up in order to trip that 30 amp OC GP however I actually
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recently did a build with 24 hard drives and I found when I initially booted it
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up this was with a Quattro 1200 watt when I initially booted it up I was
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getting an error the system was shutting down and what I was able to do with that
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one was I had to adapt and use a different 12volt rail to power some of
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the hard drives so if you are powering like 24 hard drives and then some other
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stuff sorry about that we reached maximum video length which means I
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better finish this up pretty quick so anyway I had to use an adap with that
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one suffice to say I would have been able to just take a cable and plug it
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into the PCIe connector on this one and that would have taken care of it for Me
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by putting some of the hard drives on a separate 12volt rail so that when they
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all spin up at the same time and draw a bunch of juice it doesn't trigger the
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ocp so thank you for checking out my unboxing of the antec high current Pro
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1200 watt continuous power 80 plus gold
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all that good stuff don't forget to subscribe to Linus techtips for more
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