HEC (a.k.a. Compucase) is a traditional OEM manufacturer, meaning that their core business is to manufacture power supplies (and cases) to other companies. They decided to enter the retail business but in order to not compete with their customers they decided to launch products with lower specs. According to HEC, their goal is to deliver high-quality power supplies costing less than high-end competitors. We’ve got an AcePower 480 W to see if this is really true. Let’s take an in-depth look at this power supply.
We would classify AcePower 480 W (ACE 480UB or HEC-480TD-TF) as a mid-range product: it doesn’t have all the fancy features found on high-end power supplies, but at the same time it is far from being a low-end product, as we will see throughout this article.
In order to achieve HEC’s goal, this power supply doesn’t have active PFC and also doesn’t have a modular cabling system, like fancy high-end power supplies.
A couple of months ago we disassembled another 480 W model from HEC, WinPower, and at the time we were impressed with its cost/benefit ratio. Disassembling this AcePower model we discovered that internally it is identical to WinPower, the only difference between the two being the fans: while WinPower uses a big 120 mm fan on its bottom, AcePower uses two 80 mm fans, one at its front and the other on its back, glowing blue when the unit is turned on.
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Figure 1: HEC AcePower 480 W.
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Figure 2: HEC AcePower 480 W.
In Figure 1, you can see that this power supply has a 110/220 V switch, indicating that it doesn’t have PFC circuit (power supplies with active PFC don’t have a 110/220 V switch).
Like WinPower 480 W, this power supply has six peripheral power cables: two Serial ATA power cables containing two SATA power connectors each; two peripheral power cables containing two standard peripheral power connectors and one floppy disk drive power connector each; one peripheral power cable containing two standard peripheral power connectors; and one PCI Express auxiliary power cable containing two auxiliary PCI Express power connectors for SLI or CrossFire configurations.
The only thing missing compared to WinPower 480 W is an EPS12V adapter, which is present on WinPower 480 W. On the other hand, AcePower comes with a fan monitoring cable to be connected to the motherboard. Thru this cable you can monitor the power supply fans through any system monitoring program, including the ability to shut down the computer if the fans stop working.
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Figure 3: Fan monitoring cable.
