Power Supply [SFFn] HDPlex 400w HiFi DC-ATX - The Next Generation

confusis

John Morrison. Founder and Team Leader of SFF.N
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With great excitement from the community, HDPlex launched the 400w HiFi DC-ATX power supply a short while back. Replacing the 300w unit that the community loved, this uprated unit adds that little extra "zing" for your system build. With a new design aesthetic, a change from the previous black and white colour scheme, this new 400 watt DC-DC power supply is an exciting addition to the DC-DC PSU world.

Read more here.
 

Soul_Est

SFF Guru
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Feb 12, 2016
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I really liked this review and your attention to detail is impeccable! Thank you especially for bringing attention to issue of obfuscation in products. That is another thing that gets on my nerves too.
 
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Phuncz

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May 9, 2015
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Love the review and depth of component analysis ! I really want one of these, if there ever comes a similar specced internal AC-DC power supply so these can be used internally, I'm out of excuses to not get one !
 

confusis

John Morrison. Founder and Team Leader of SFF.N
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Jun 19, 2015
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Without an oscilloscope there is no way to ascertain noise characteristics, so i cannot determine an answer to that m from a physical perspective, the design and component selection is excellent, so i expect a good result in any case.
 

Josh | NFC

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Another fantastic review, John!

Has the problem regarding to powering on again from sleep/hibernate been resolved? Few posts in s4 mini thread mentioned the problem but noone followed up.

I've built dozens of systems with this unit and I've never been able to replicate this issue. Not saying it doesn't exist, but I think it must be pretty rare. I especially would like to replicate it because I could try many different power supplies to really isolate it. So if anyone wants to send me one that exhibits this symptom...

Naturally, I am curious to the cause, and I'm sure Larry is too. He is super dedicated to making the absolute best product possible and making timely improvements.
 

Mortis Angelus

Airflow Optimizer
Jun 22, 2017
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Excellent review!

I wish that HDplex would start producing their own 400W external bricks and have a bundle ready to go. Sure, there are modded bricks, but to get a proper in-house brick would be even more awesome. With their skills, they might even manage to make it smaller than Dell's offering.
 

K888D

SFF Guru
Lazer3D
Feb 23, 2016
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Great review!

I've been using one of these for testing over the past month or so. It works great and it looks great!

I've had no issues with it other than 1 random shutdown during a game of PUBG (luckily I was already dead and spectating), but I think this was caused by the HDPLEX 300W AC-DC unit I was using to power it. I've since swapped to the DELL 330W external brick and its been fine since.

The 300W AC-DC runs very hot, even when the system is idle it feels very hot to the touch, after an hour of gaming the unit feels burning hot. I've not measured it but I think my system is probably drawing in the region of 200w - 250w while gaming.

I think the AC-DC unit needs good airflow over it to keep heat levels acceptable, or perhaps it is designed to work best when mounted to the large heat sinks of the HDPLEX cases to help dissipate its heat. The Dell 330W brick feels comparatively much cooler to the touch, but it is larger.
 

Broxin

Cable-Tie Ninja
Jun 16, 2017
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Thanks for this great review.
Though, i missed an "overload" test where you draw more than 400W to see if all the AI chips are doing their work of securely shutting the HDPlex off.
Also would be interesting to know how much load it can bare over 400W until it shuts down.
 
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Josh | NFC

Not From Concentrate
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Jun 12, 2015
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Thanks for this great review.
Though, i missed an "overload" test where you draw more than 400W to see if all the AI chips are doing their work of securely shutting the HDPlex off.
Also would be interesting to know how much load it can bare over 400W until it shuts down.

I 100% agree with you that it would be interesting to know when it shuts off, but it is also 100% unnecessary. I make this claim because it already powers the 7700K and a 1080ti and barely gets warm. There aren't many more GPUs that are more powerful or desirable than the 1080ti, so if it can handle that combo, anything else is far outside the scope of ultra mini itx.

It doesn't have support for quad PCIE 8 pin anyway, after all.

The only thing I would be interested in knowing is if it could stably power the R9 Nano through its ULTRA "micro peaks" XD. But seeing how the HDPLEX 250 could once you put a 1000w PSU behind it, I'm confident that the HDPLEX 400 could.

The only thing people need to know that isn't covered, is that you will hear coil whine with the 1080ti. With the 1080, the dozen or so HDPLEX 400s I have used are very quiet, although I did have one customer who had some bad whine. However most of the whine comes from the GPU anyway.

Peace, my friend!
 

Josh | NFC

Not From Concentrate
NFC Systems
Jun 12, 2015
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Great review!

I've been using one of these for testing over the past month or so. It works great and it looks great!

I've had no issues with it other than 1 random shutdown during a game of PUBG (luckily I was already dead and spectating), but I think this was caused by the HDPLEX 300W AC-DC unit I was using to power it. I've since swapped to the DELL 330W external brick and its been fine since.

The 300W AC-DC runs very hot, even when the system is idle it feels very hot to the touch, after an hour of gaming the unit feels burning hot. I've not measured it but I think my system is probably drawing in the region of 200w - 250w while gaming.

I think the AC-DC unit needs good airflow over it to keep heat levels acceptable, or perhaps it is designed to work best when mounted to the large heat sinks of the HDPLEX cases to help dissipate its heat. The Dell 330W brick feels comparatively much cooler to the touch, but it is larger.

With my "seal of approval" which basically means I don't have to worry about overpromising then doing alot of technical support emails, the HDPLEX 300 AC-DC is suitable for a 200w system without active cooling with 100% stability. This means a 92w CPU, and a 1060 with a little overhead.

I think you could push a 1070 off it if you could do a little tweaking with a 65w or lower CPU.

The 1080 can be made to run off it with tuning, but in some games, like PUBG, SoM, MWO, WOT, MLL it will have random resets and get burning hot.

With active cooling I was able to run a 7700K and a 1080 mini off the AC-DC 300 with no tuning in PUBG indefinitely, but I would get infrequent resets during the drop phase. I think with a little tuning you could get further with active cooling.

I still recommend the Dell 330 in all instances until I can find the best use case for the 300 AC-DC form factor.

The 160 AC DC unit is brilliant and can be fit in a S4 MINI and power a nice CPU + a 1050ti internally, which makes for a fun system. I have been testing that out for the past week as I want to support internal connectors and I'm impressed with how powerful this GPU actually is. I have pubg running above 70FPS at 2560x1440. No eyecandy and screen scaling is on, but most people lower that stuff anyways to be competitive as possible. Neat.
 

K888D

SFF Guru
Lazer3D
Feb 23, 2016
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www.lazer3d.com
With my "seal of approval" which basically means I don't have to worry about overpromising then doing alot of technical support emails, the HDPLEX 300 AC-DC is suitable for a 200w system without active cooling with 100% stability. This means a 92w CPU, and a 1060 with a little overhead.

I think you could push a 1070 off it if you could do a little tweaking with a 65w or lower CPU.

The 1080 can be made to run off it with tuning, but in some games, like PUBG, SoM, MWO, WOT, MLL it will have random resets and get burning hot.

With active cooling I was able to run a 7700K and a 1080 mini off the AC-DC 300 with no tuning in PUBG indefinitely, but I would get infrequent resets during the drop phase. I think with a little tuning you could get further with active cooling.

I still recommend the Dell 330 in all instances until I can find the best use case for the 300 AC-DC form factor.

The 160 AC DC unit is brilliant and can be fit in a S4 MINI and power a nice CPU + a 1050ti internally, which makes for a fun system. I have been testing that out for the past week as I want to support internal connectors and I'm impressed with how powerful this GPU actually is. I have pubg running above 70FPS at 2560x1440. No eyecandy and screen scaling is on, but most people lower that stuff anyways to be competitive as possible. Neat.
I'm glad someone else is finding similar results with the 300 AC-DC, it certainly struggles to stay cool even at low loads without active cooling.

Would love to get some PUBG Squad games arranged with some of the guys on here.
 

bledha

Airflow Optimizer
Feb 22, 2017
307
268
Another fantastic review, John!



I've built dozens of systems with this unit and I've never been able to replicate this issue. Not saying it doesn't exist, but I think it must be pretty rare. I especially would like to replicate it because I could try many different power supplies to really isolate it. So if anyone wants to send me one that exhibits this symptom...

Naturally, I am curious to the cause, and I'm sure Larry is too. He is super dedicated to making the absolute best product possible and making timely improvements.

Larry seems to be wise to the issue. I was going to pick up a 400w unit in exchange for a pair of 160s that weren't cutting it and he communicated to me that, since I generally work with Gigabyte ITX boards for workstations, he couldn't guarantee that there would not be any issues relating to power management, sleep/wake, etc. So it seems to be down to that. Compatibility with some Gigabyte boards, I mean.

I didn't pester him further, because he also said he is working (and has been for some time already) at pushing out a revised version to amend this or even a workaround to let users know about.

That being said, can't fault HDPlex and Larry. Hands down fastest customer response time I have ever had - and I have admittedly asked a lot of silly questions that I likely could have found out through Google.
 

confusis

John Morrison. Founder and Team Leader of SFF.N
Original poster
SFF Network
SFF Workshop
SFFn Staff
Jun 19, 2015
4,129
7,057
sff.network
Thanks for this great review.
Though, i missed an "overload" test where you draw more than 400W to see if all the AI chips are doing their work of securely shutting the HDPlex off.
Also would be interesting to know how much load it can bare over 400W until it shuts down.

Without a supply that could safely supply 400w of 19v, this is not a thing I can do. Also, I don't have enough "hot" hardware to load a PSU past 300!

What would be awesome is a proper PSU load tester, but those start in the low thousands of dollars :(
 
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Josh | NFC

Not From Concentrate
NFC Systems
Jun 12, 2015
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Larry seems to be wise to the issue. I was going to pick up a 400w unit in exchange for a pair of 160s that weren't cutting it and he communicated to me that, since I generally work with Gigabyte ITX boards for workstations, he couldn't guarantee that there would not be any issues relating to power management, sleep/wake, etc. So it seems to be down to that. Compatibility with some Gigabyte boards, I mean.

I didn't pester him further, because he also said he is working (and has been for some time already) at pushing out a revised version to amend this or even a workaround to let users know about.

That being said, can't fault HDPlex and Larry. Hands down fastest customer response time I have ever had - and I have admittedly asked a lot of silly questions that I likely could have found out through Google.


See, this is a piece to the puzzle.

I haven't used a single Z270 motherboard from Gigabyte--I use ASRock and ASUS boards. I love GB boards, it's just this generation that it hasn't come up for me.