Conclusion
With the HCP-850 Antec released a true high-end product. At
least at a first glance. There is a costly AC filtering stage, an extremely high
end fan, and the massive use of Nippon Chemi-Con and Rubycon capacitors. These
are things which stand for highest quality and its hard to find other PC PSU's
which are built according to similar standards. Furthermore this PSU is very
reliable even if you plan it for long term usage. On the other hand there is the
fact, that the 12V Mosfets could have been equipped with a more powerful cooling
solution. Those Mosfets are only cooled indirectly via the case. Additionally
the heatsinks are relatively small. Due to the fact that there is no clean airflow
because of the messy design, Antec had to use a very strong fan for
cooling. Therefore this PSU is relatively noisy under high loads.
The HCP-850 is a good PSU which does fulfil all its promises. But still, we
recommend
the Antec HCP-1000 Platinum (same OEM) instead. The latter has one of the nicest
and cleanest designs we have seen so far in a retail PSU. Antec/Delta
improved massively. Therefore we rate the Antec HCP-850 only with 3.5 Stars.
Author: JAVASCRIPT
l.muehle@ocaholic.ch