On Figure 14 you can see WinPower 480 W label stating all its power specs.
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Figure 14: Power supply label.
What immediately caught our eye were the two separated +12 V lines listed on the label (see Figure 14). As it happens to all power supplies nowadays, HEC uses a “virtual rail” concept, where they label their power supplies as having separated +12 V rails but inside the unit they are all connected together to a single +12 V rail on the power supply printed circuit board. Unfortunately all manufacturers seem to be doing like this to match the ATX12V 2.x and EPS12V specifications, which require the power supply to have separated +12V rails.
Inside this power supply, the wires are separated into three sets, two sets labeled as +12V1 and one set labeled as +12V2. The wires from this second set have a blue stripe on them and are used by the auxiliary PCI Express power cable and by the ATX12V power cable (the ATX12V power cable uses one wire from +12V1 and one wire from +12V2).
On Figures 15 and 16 you can see how the +12 V virtual rails are connected (the red lines are jumpers, i.e. wires).
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Figure 15: Three +12 V wire sets are separated into two groups.
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Figure 16: But they are connected to the same +12 V line on the PCB.
From the previous page we came with some maximum theoretical numbers for the +12V output (480 W), +5 V (300 W) and +3.3 V (198 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 capacitor, 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).
Anyway, all positive outputs are labeled with a current well below the maximum current each rectifier can deliver.
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.
