Date: March 2nd, 2009
Article by: Joe Anderson (Hardware Reviewer)
Edited By: Nathan Glentworth (Owner / Head Editor)
Product was submitted by: Hiper
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PRODUCT PICTORIAL AND WALKTHROUGH
All of the native cables are generous in length and, like the 24-pin ATX cable, fully sleeved in a black plastic mesh material. Hiper eschews the more common “20+4” pin connector for a one-piece 24-pin connector, and you can't fault them for abandoning legacy support for a spec this outdated. The USB connector connects to a mobo header to provide functionality for the USB features of this PSU.
From left to right, the Hiper 680W supports both 4-pin and 8-pin motherboards with separate cables for each configuration. For 4-pin Molex connectors, Hiper has taken a different path than its competition by providing three cables, of differing length terminating in a single connector. While this would seem to be a negative, the “ExTender” cables more than make up for the apparent shortcomings of this design. I actually found that it was much easier to route cables in a large case to be much easier with this arrangement.
The two native SATA power cables have two connectors each in a more conventional layout. While four SATAs will be sufficient for most installs, I'd like to see a couple more. Hiper offers a Y-adapter for this purpose, but you'll have to spend a little extra money to get one.
PCIe power is delivered via both 6-pin and 8-pin connectors, with an adapter included for multi-card graphics solutions or video cards requiring two 6-pin connectors.
The “ExTender” cables, like the native cables attached to the PSU, have gold-plated connectors and provide some unique configuration options to the builder. The user's guide has very complete instructions about how to use these little darlings and, as I mentioned earlier, they can make a clean installation much easier. I like this option very much and I wish more companies would include a similar feature.
Let's hook this unit up to some hardware and see how it does.
