Antec High Current Pro 1200W Modular Power Supply Review

Opening the unit up held a few surprises! I undid the screws holding the top on as usual, lifted the lid off and… oh. This is what I was greeted with:

I removed that bit of PCB by unscrewing it and undoing the hefty connectors linking it to the other PCB and placed it down. So, here lies the secret of the small size of this unit- it uses a duel PCB design which I thought was an excellent move! The only time I have heard of this design being used before was with Antec’s CP-series PSUs which were designed for Antec’s own form factor which has more height that a standard ATX PSU. The disadvantage of this setup is that there is no room for a top mounted fan, so a rear mounted one has to be used instead. On the CP-series units, the different form factor allowed them to fit a quieter 120mm fan, but when limited to a standard ATX form factor a louder 80mm fan has to be used. On the positive side, this design reduces length, can provide efficient ‘wind tunnel’ cooling and allows for a far better topographical design. The top PCB holds the transient filtering and part of the Active Power Factor Control circuitry, and the bottom PCB holds everything else.

The first stage inside a PSU is the transient filtering. This is where the unit filters the AC power coming from the mains so there is less noise which is extremely important as it impacts the efficiency and safety of the later stages, which is partly the reason you see people investing hundreds of pounds in UPS systems which do a similar job. To do this, a system of capacitors, ferrite coils and a metal oxide varistor is used. The quality of this stage is determined by the number of components doing the filtering. Many generic units will only have a singular capacitor or won’t have a metal oxide varistor (MOV). This unit uses an inline ferrite bead and, unlike most PSUs all the filtering is done on the PCB. It consists of an MOV, two chokes, an X cap and four Y caps which, as expected, indicates a very high quality design.

These heatsinks are the two rectifier bridges for the APFC.

Here’s a unique feature of the HCP-1200- the transformer directly attach to the MOSFETS that regulate the 12V voltage.

These two well insulated VRMs convert some 12V power into lower voltages for the 5V and 3.3V rails.

The main caps, as usual, are Nippon-Chemicon. The APFC uses 4 of these alone which should provide excellent results!

Many of the secondary caps are polymer which is great to see as they have a much better durability.