The New ANTEC TP-750 Up Close
Being tested today is the TP-750 which offers the basic no frills appearance while the TP-750 “Blue” sibling is equipped with a 120mm blue LED cooling fan vs the regular non LED one in our test unit. If you want the sexy Antec blue LED lighting, perhaps for your gaming system, then that’s the model for you. Otherwise, there’s no performance difference between the two.
As you can see, this is a simple very cleanly put together power supply. The PSU offers a charcoal gray painted chassis which has a pretty smooth finish. This indicates that Antec used a decent amount of paint to offer such a clean finish. This is also Antec standard operating procedure as well and they are known for not sending out a product without some sort of refinement.
Speaking of refinement, the PSU is cooled by a very quiet 120mm fan. As of late, there haven’t been any loud cooling fans on any of the PSUs tested in the last couple years. They’ve grown to be more quiet and continue to move at least 60 to 70 CFM at full speed. This is just one of the pleasant features found inside ANTEC power supplies these days.
The cable side of the PSU hosts the hybrid cabling ports. What that means is you can use the extra modular cables in any of the ports including the red ports intended for 8-pin PCI Express support. So, if you don’t have video cards requiring 6+2-pin power cables, you could plug in more SATA or ATA devices using these same red ports. You still have the other two black ports for peripheral cabling as well in case you need to cable it all up.
At first, one might think that the red 8-pin PCIE port should equate to a full 6+2-pin cable. However, PCIE cables require a different set of wiring that can’t be shared with the black ports. Thus, the right six pins can only be used for peripherals. Also, the notch keeps things simple and prevents any incorrect connections from being made. so you aren’t sliding the two pins over by accident.
Surgical Inspection
After donning a pair of surgical gloves and mask, the PSU was preped for surgery. A state of the art magnetic, stainless steel screw driver was used to make the incision. A few screws were removed which fasten the chassis. Opening the chassis, reveals a small network of wires and components. You can’t quite tell that the PCB is dual layered just from looking at it even up close. About the only way to confirm that it’s dual layer is to literally cut the PCB open and compared copper.
There are two rows of thick, black heat sinks attached to the internal switching circuits. These pretty much tower over all of the beefy components soldered to the PCB underneath. Other than the usual factory scrapes, it all appears to be well soldered from PCB to socket wires. It looks like it’s all business inside.
If you’ve heard the term, “size matters”, it’s true for capacitors. The quality of the capacitor is especially important for better life and power quality. There’s a large 500uF black cap no doubt chosen to provide as much power as possible without suffering from being over worked. What it comes down to is that better quality capacitors can make all the difference when it comes to reliable power whether at low or maximum load capacities.