Power Supply Roundup: 730W to 900W

Hiper 4M880 and 5X880 - 880W

The second series of Hiper today comes with a different design and a different internal topology. The 5X includes eight USB ports and an additional port that can support up to 1A while the PC is off. This PSU also comes in a nice, shiny paintjob. Due to the USB ports on the back, the venting holes only occupy the upper section.

The 4M has no USB ports and a has normal black matte coating, but the space where the USB ports would have been located is still closed. Hiper started the idea of keeping the housing open with a mesh a long time ago. This idea has pros and cons since we might have increased problems with EMI and the airflow could also recycle back into the system. During our tests we couldn't answer the EMI question since we lack the proper equipment, but we might be able to help out with the venting issue since we didn't find any negative temperature results with the actual design.

Both units are the same inside and therefore we see the same data on the labels. The first two 12V rails are rated at 18A and the second two rails at 30A. The both 30A rails will be powering the graphics card PEG connectors, which makes sense.

Cables and Connectors

The cable harnesses look nice and sleek, and we see a slightly different harness output from the housing than we have seen before. Hiper doesn't have one big hole where all the cables are pressed through. Instead, the different harnesses are pressed in groups of two to three harnesses through five different openings. The benefit is that it's easier to access the different harnesses when you want to attach a new device since the connectors are not mixed.

The cables are quite short and especially the Molex connectors have a very short length. However, it's clever to make the graphics card connectors of different lengths since the cards always sit on top of each other. There are two harnesses for the graphics cards, each with one 8-pin and one 6-pin connector attached.

The inside of the Hiper unit looks very similar to a well-known manufacturer. We won't name names, as Hiper made many changes to the internal design. There are several smaller heatsinks inside; the secondary heatsink remains as a single unit, while the primary is made up of three smaller heatsinks that cool different components like rectifier bridges and diodes.