Introduction

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 a WinPower 480 W to see if this is really true. Let’s take an in-depth look on this power supply.

We would classify WinPower 480 W (WIN 480UB) 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. Its design, however, resembles a high-end product. As you can see on Figure 1, it uses a big 120-mm fan on its bottom, using a mesh on the back. As you should already know, regular power supplies have only a 80-mm fan on its back. The solution used by HEC provides not only a far better airflow but also a lower noise level, as 120-mm fans are quieter than 80-mm parts.

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Figure 1: HEC WinPower 480 W.

On 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).

On Figure 2 you can see the power supply cables. Like we mentioned it doesn’t use a modular cabling system, however it uses a plastic sleeving on each cable in order to protect the wires and help the PC internal airflow.

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Figure 2: HEC WinPower 480 W cables.

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. This power supply also comes with an EPS12V adapter that can be installed on any standard peripheral power connector from the power supply.

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