Super Flower Leadex Platinum 750 W: semi-fanless and fully-modular unit

Connectors & cabling

The cabling is strange. Some (but not all) of the wires in both the ATX 12 V cables are 16AWG, also most of the wires in the Main ATX are 16AWG; only the ones conducting small currents (like −12 V) are 18AWG, and the feedback wires are 22AWG. OK, this can do. All the cables for peripherals (SATA, molex) also utilize 18AWG wires, welded to form flat black ribbons while all the other cabling is sleeved. The molex connectors are equipped with clips for easier unplugging. But both the cables carrying two 6+2pin PCIe connectors each use only 18AWG wires. Not only that, but there are only 6 wires (total) used for each cable! That means they have to carry back even the power from the additional 2-pin connectors (which actually use only 22AWG wires) and there is only three of them (for return)! I think there is a good reason to use 5 ground wires (to provide proper grounding so it is not floating on different potential).

That somehow feels cheap to me, especially after those 16AWG cables you would not expect such lousy PCIe cables. What is even worse is that none of the connectors have gold-plated pins. That means the unit has two el-cheapo PCIe cables where not only there are six thin wires which are to carry up to 8.33 A each (while this is definitely a unit people may feed one or two 300W graphics cards with), but they even have no gold-plating. And for example some crazy bitcoin miners would draw as much as 400 W per cable, that’s over 11 A per pin, long out of safety zone. And even out of some specs – I have seen many sources claiming different information as maximum allowed current for this kind of pins, some were only about 10 A and some even less. This is not what I would expect from such a premium unit as I have already seen my share of connectors burned to ash.

In total, we have:

• 1× Main ATX (20+4pin): 59 cm
• 2× ATX 12 V (4+4pin): 69 cm
• 4× PCIe (6+2pin):  2× 61 cm, 2× 73 cm
• 10× SATA: 3× 50 cm, 3× 63 cm, 2× 76 cm, 2× 90cm
• 5× peripheral molex: 1× 50 cm, 1× 63 cm, 1× 74 cm, 1× 77 cm, 1× 90 cm
• 1× Berg for FDD: 87 cm

We can see that Super Flower uses some quite unique modular connectors for the Leadex Platinum 750 W (and the whole Leadex family for that matter). The Main ATX cable has two special connectors, while all the remaining 9-pin ones carry +3.3 V, +5 V and +12 V wires so they are fully universal. On one hand, this is great because they can use all the same connectors and the user is not able to plug the connector to a wrong one. On the other hand I still think Super Flower does not make so many units to get these exotic transparent connectors cheaper than the ordinary PCI Express or EPS connectors. It would be good if they at least use 4 pins for ground connections for the PCI Express cables. As it is now, they could have very well made universal connectors from just smaller 8-pin EPS. As these 9-pin ones are somewhat physically larger, it is also more difficult to unplug them.

Casing & cooling

The metal chassis of the Leadex Platinum 750 W is made out of 1mm SECC steel, and it has a matte black finish (which is most likely a powder coating). The fan grill is made by directly punching holes into the second (upper) part of the metal casing. It has nice rounded shape which should improve the air movement with less turbulence, but I still somewhat feel this will be more restrictive for air than a plain wire grill. But it is most likely cheaper to produce.

The outtake part of the chassis uses an ordinary hexagonal mesh pattern, but this time it perfectly covers almost the entire area of the back part. I think this unit uses the most of the area surface of all units I have ever seen. We should therefore expect that there won’t be any pockets of hot air trapped in this unit and overall the amount of moved air will be very high due to little restriction.

About 1/4 of the fan area is covered with plastic film though. Super Flower is using the Globe Fan RL4Z B1352512HH, a ball bearing 135mm one. According to its datasheet, the maximum speed should be 1800 RPM with a maximum airflow of 129.76 CFM and a noise level of 33.9 dBA. That – once again – is if you believe it has exactly the same specifications as ordinary sleeve bearing version. This also applies for the ordinary versions (most of them) with 11 blades, this fan only has 7 blades the airflow will be lower, most likely even the noise will be lower. I have since acquired the full fan specification, so here it is! At least I hope I got the right ones as they say FDB while this is ball bearing. Anyway. The maximum speed should be rated for 1850 RPM with airflow of 100.74 CFM. Maximum static pressure is 2.11 mm of water column with maximum noise of 39.6 dBA. MTBF is 50000 hours at 40 °C.

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