Antec High Current Gamer M 750 W (HCG-750M) review

Secondary side

The secondary side is most likely the part with the greatest changes. It consists of the usual diode rectifiers of single output rail, in this case of five pieces of Diodes SBR30A50CT (30/260 A at 50 V and 25 °C, drop of 0.55 V at 15 A and 25 °C) in TO-220 package. The heatsink they are mounted to consists of actually two pieces (screwed together) in the half where these devices are located. While by the other half of the heatsink, the DC-DC module daughterboard is located (instead of second heatsink). This is interesting configuration as it takes little extra space while keeping the board close to the actual +12V output (for better efficiency). Behind a big inductor we have two filtering capacitors, NCC KZE 2200/16 and 3900/16 in parallel. They actually form first half of double Pi filter, as there are two inductors forming two +12V “rails”, and each such rail has another KZE 2200/16 as well. The “V2” output of the modular board shares the rail with Main ATX and ATX 12 V fixed cables.

The DC-DC module board is the same as used for the G/S12G units, it seems Seasonic is also using this as universal component for multiple units. It uses Anpec APW7159 dual-channel controller and Infineon IPD060N03L G (50/350 A at 25 °C and 30 V, RDS(On) 6 mΩ at 30 A and 25 °C) transistors. There are two Enesol Enecap 330/16 polymers on the +12V input for additional filtering, and then two pairs of KZE 3300/10 on each output. As for the −12 V rail, the negative voltage is generated from that big secondary coil I mentioned earlier. Separate winding feeds an ST Micro L7912CV linear regulator. The input is filtered by NCC KZH 1000/25 capacitor, the output then by KY 220/16.

If we move to the modular board, connected by thick, 14AWG wires, we can see there are also some capacitors for additional filtering. Three KY 1000/16: one for peripherals and one for each PCIe output connectors, which also have single 330/16 polymers each. Another such polymer is for +5 V and two 560/6.3 in parallel for +3.3 V. The supervisor in the HCG-750M is the usual Silicon Touch Technology PS223, which among other also monitors two +12V rails and also OTP. For that it has thermistor probe screwed to the secondary heatsink. It also worth mentioning this unit has sense feedback for not only +3.3V rail, but also +5V and +12V rail.

Build quality

As usual, I’ll focus on the overall build quality and other things like electrical safety here, as the quality of the components that were used was already discussed before. The separation between the primary and secondary sides is good. Both the varistor and the thermistor are sleeved with heatshrink. The design is nice and clean, but the wave soldering is not the best I have seen. There are about five manually-resoldered joints which have not been cleaned afterwards. It looks like the unit was cleaned automatically after the wave soldering, but then they found some problems, resoldered few joints and leave it as it is.

And there are still a few joints which are close to cracking and deserve some treatment as well. I know this is mainstream unit, but still, some problems may arise from this. Rather large quantities of silicone have been used to fix the components in place throughout the whole unit. Many electrodes are not precisely trimmed, quite the opposite, they are long. Some of them are also bent such that they almost touch some others, this could definitely improve. I also found one large solder ball and two tiny ones. Conductive paths are not reinforced much. The modular board is nice and clean though. Overall I’ll deduct 5 points.

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