The quest for the ultimate power supply

We were worried we wouldn’t see any mid-range power supplies struggle, but the Hiper Type R proved us quite wrong. It struggled to spin up the sixteen 7200RPM drives, and when we added a single 10K Raptor to the mix we were only able to POST 50 per cent of the time.

We had to give it a leg up by disconnecting the power to half the drives running off the RAID card, then plugging them in a few seconds later to stagger the power draw at startup. Once in Windows and still unsatisfied, we connected two more drives before we started the quest for a really big value of Pi, only to have the system lock up on us.

While we were testing we saw a miracle-powered 750W power supply complete all our tests with all our drives connected, and we’ll be reviewing it next issue. But it’s safe to assume that the Hiper’s 12V line – which was provided by four 12v lines and sagged to worryingly low voltages under high load – is its Achilles heel.

For normal systems it’ll do the job, but for monster systems all you need to know is that it has officially become the first PSU to be slapped down by Big Willy.

12V1 – 16A
12V2 – 16A
12V3 – 16A
12V4 – 18A
5V – 30A
3.3V – 25A

RRP: $189