Internal Features
Upon opening the TPQ850, it is evident that the inside is dominated by two very large heatsinks. Given the TPQ850 is also an extremely heavy unit – heavier even than the Thermaltake TP1200 – and we have to think a large part of that weight is courtesy of these massive heatsinks. On the primary conditioning side of the unit, you can see the primary capacitor and inductor (choke). Unfortunately we seem to have forgotten to take a picture of that side, but it is pretty boring and all you need to know about it is that it is cleanly laid out and protected from dust by a clear acetate sheet that also aids in airflow. From various markings on the unit, it is evident that Enhance Electronics is the OEM for the unit. This is again a peculiar choice from Antec, who had been using, and has seen quite a large amount of success with, Channel Well as an OEM in the past. Both OEMs have proven quite capable of making high-output power supplies in the past. Enhance is used heavily by Silverstone and Tagan to great avail. The Cooler Master RPP series, which we have reviewed positively, is also manufactured by Enhance. This initial discovery bodes well for Antec with the TPQ850.


There is an interesting secondary circuit board located above the rail leads that we had to investigate. Removing the little black fabric shielding reveals some pretty boring stuff. From the connections on this PCB, we believe it is some sort of regulatory area. Two temperature probes are attached to this PCB, as well as each of the voltage rails… some sort of hardware monitoring perhaps? The fan is also powered from this PCB. Below there is an absolute jungle of cables. We typically like to trace each of the +12V rails back to the leads on the PCB so we can get an idea of which rail powers which devices, but doing so in this instance was pretty much impossible. We didn’t give up that easily, however, and decided to disassemble the unit a bit further. Taking a look at the rear of the modular PCB, we can clearly where each lead is soldered into the PCB. Unfortunately we are not sure whether each of the +12V inputs you see here come from individual rails, so we’ll simply have to assume they are. On the topic of rails, most of them appear to be derived from a single large transformer (with probably the +5 and +3.3V rails coming from a separate, smaller transformer). We do not have any qualms with the design, not since the OCZ GXS850 exceeded our expectations for such a configuration.


We are very disappointed with the way, or lack thereof, that Antec affixed the mass of cables to the chassis of the TPQ850. If someone was carrying the unit around by the cables (not recommended, but convenient and frequently done), it is very possible that one could be dislodged from the PCB, as that is (basically) directly where the force of gravity is being applied. A simple collar or even twisty-tie could have fixed this problem handily.

Testbed and Methods
Test Setup

• Case: Thermaltake Armor
• Power Supply: Tagan Turbojet TG1100-U96 1100W | Thermaltake Toughpower W0133 1200W
• Motherboard: ASUS L1N64-SLI WS
• Processor: (2x) AMD Athlon 64 FX-74 (Quad FX)
• Hard Drive: (2x) Western Digital WD1500ADFD 10,000RPM, RAID-0
• Hard Drive: (1x) Western Digital WD5000KS 7,200RPM
• Video: (1x) NVIDIA GeForce 8800GTX
  
• Memory: 4096MB (2x(2x1024MB)) Corsair XMS2 PC2 6400
• Optical Drive: Lite-ON SHW160P6S05
• Cooling: (2x) Vigor Monsoon II

Software Configuration

• Motherboard BIOS: L1N64-SLI WS Release BIOS 0124
• Operating System: Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2
• Video Driver: NVIDIA ForceWare Version 158.22 (May 17 release)

We called in our usual testbed for the TPQ850 and will be comparing the scores we achieve with those of the OCZ GXS850. Unfortunately, due to the lack of four PCI-E connectors on the GXS850, we had to pull an 8800GTX from the system, which decreased power consumption under full load to the 850W area, down from the 1100 neighborhood. While it would have been nice to test this power supply on a system it technically could not support, we do not yet have the catalog of scores necessary for such a test. Furthermore, we still do not have the resources to truly test every aspect of this power supply. As such, the only values we will be testing are the voltages across each major rail and the total power consumption of the system (sans monitor). Voltages will be read from a digital multimeter at four distinct loading conditions. Power draw (W) will be measured using a Kill-A-Watt meter plugged in at the wall socket.

The four loading conditions we will use are as follows:

System Startup: Immediately prior to the Windows scroll bar appearing.
Idle: After Windows has started and background tasks have been loaded into memory.
Normal load: 50% processor load via two instances of Prime 95.
Full Load: Four instances of Prime 95 and a single instance of 3DMark06. Measurements here are taken during the “Canyon Flight” test, as the big scary fish thing pokes its head out of the water for the second time.