Lian Li SP750 750W SFX Power Supply Review

A Closer Look

Out of the box, the Lian Li SP750 presents itself well, with one of the first things catching your eye being the lovely brushed steel effect to the exterior metal. Despite its small size, it feels nice and weighty in hand, which is generally a good sign of a quality power supply.

One of the key branding aspects of the SP750 is the Lian Li logo placed above the fan. In terms of size and layout, it looks excellent albeit there is something about the appearance that almost looks like a high-quality sticker. I can assure you though, this is been integrated into the design and is solid metal.

Aside from the Lian Li logo’s, you do get the product name written on the side, and part of me wishes that they’d followed up with electric blue colouring on the exterior packaging. There’s just something about the SP750 below that makes me think that at a glance (and without noticing the Lian Li name), you might mistake this for a certain ship-themed manufacturer.

The cable input bank is well presented as a fully modular design, with each section being clearly denoted for its use. Although not featuring a ‘back to back’ design, which often makes cable insertion/removal easier, you will note that the main ports are offset, which gets around any potential problem this could create. I don’t know if this was by design or accident, but hey, it works!

The exhaust panel to the SP750 is huge, with practically all of the available space well utilised for the best level of airflow. A key factor as passive airflow will be important to ensure this power supplies ‘ZERO RPM’ fan function works as intended.

The remaining section of the power supply lists all of the technical specifications. In a very smart move though, Lian Li has placed this on the one panel that is practically guaranteed to be obscured within a system. So if you don’t want a wall of text cluttering up the look of your SFX build, this should solve that problem for you.

As this is an SFX power supply, we just wanted to give you a visual reference as to how small it is. With it sitting shorter than a stick of DDR4 memory in the picture below, we hope this clearly demonstrates to you just how tiny this SP750 actually is!

Cabling

As this is a small form factor (SFX) power supply, the length of the cabling is (as you might expect) not overly generous. By and large though, users shouldn’t have any problems successfully hooking all their components up while keeping the airflow and management as optimal as possible.

The cables themselves are individually braided, which certainly looks nice while offering plenty of ‘flex’ for weaving through tight spaces. In addition, each is also itemised to ensure that the user can quickly identify the cables they need for your components.

Internals – A Look Inside!

Opening up the Lian Li SP750, the initial impressions are very good. Everything looks clean, tidy, well organised and perhaps surprisingly so for a SFX power supply offering 750 watts of power output.

A closer look at the fan reveals it to be a 92mm third-party design. While this might initially sound rather disappointing, however, this isn’t the first time we have seen them utilised. Although I’m clearly not going to reel off a bunch of names, we’ve seen ‘Yate Loon’ fans featured in at least a dozen products (and not always power supplies) and they have never failed to impress us in terms of their performance or acoustic levels. – So you can consider this an interesting, but certainly not worrying, observation.

A closer look at the PCB does show that things have had to get a little cramped to successfully fit all of the components within such a tight space. Thinking about this more in terms of functionality, however, Lian Li has made some very smart decisions here. Firstly, everything looks decently spaced meaning that airflow should be decent. And secondly, speaking of airflow, with the fans location sitting more towards the base, this will provide direct coverage over the 2 black heat sinks (pictured below) as well as the main capacitor; arguably some of the most important parts to keep as cool as possible.

As Lian Li has stated that the SP750 utilises Japanese capacitors, it is important that we have a closer look and confirm this to be true (not, incidentally, that we’ve ever once seen this claim disproven from any manufacturer). – While we could not 100% confirm this on every single capacitor, from what we could see, we are willing to state that the claim is almost certainly genuine.

The main capacitor itself is a ‘Nippon Chemi-Con’ design. Being rated to 105C we can not only confirm that this is 100% Japanese, but it’s also one of the best products available from one of the world’s most respected electronics/capacitor manufacturers. It’s a great choice, it’s a premium choice, and hopefully this will play a key role in some nice test results.

Overall Thoughts!

Both inside and out, the Lian Li SP750 looks to be an excellently designed and, in many respect, quite visually appealing power supply. Something we don’t get to say often! – As always is the case in any of our reviews. However, while looks and appearance are good, performance is king. So, let’s get this fitted to our test bench, switch on the power, and let’s see what happens!