Hiper's Type R Mk II 880W
USB included, spoiler not

Hiper was born in the UK in 2001, so it's a relatively new player in the power supply market—and an ambitious one as well, if the Type R Mk II is any indication. With a $200 price tag and an 880W output rating, the Type R is very much a high-end unit equipped to challenge the best the industry's more established players have to offer.

But Type R? Why channel a brand popularized by riced out Acuras and Hondas with oversized spoilers when one could have drawn from the likes of Jaguar, Aston Martin, and Lotus? For once, a power supply could've had panache. Now, instead of British Racing Green, we've been given ultra-bright electric blue.

To be fair, most of the Type R's outer skin is riddled with ventilation holes, so there isn't as much bright blue as one might expect. You do get some chrome, though, thanks to the base-mounted 140mm fan. Just don't expect much of an exhaust note. Hiper bills the Type R as a low-noise model, and with that much ventilation and a massive fan, it should be pretty quiet. We'll find out just how quiet in a moment.

Around the back of the unit, we find something you don't encounter often on a power supply: USB ports. The cable bundle includes a USB connector that plugs into a standard motherboard header, making the Type R one part power supply, one part USB hub. It's hard to get really excited about a USB hub, even when it's housed inside a power supply, but there's more. The USB connector on the far left is capable of supplying juice even when a system is powered down, which is perfect for charging a cell phone. Power to this port is provided by the PSU's 5V standby line.

We don't normally cover product packaging here at TR because, well, it's rarely interesting. However, the Type R comes in a nifty plastic case that one could actually use as a sort of tool box. This isn't the sort of thing that adds immense value to the package—that is, unless you really want a cheap plastic toolbox—but it's another novel feature in an industry filled with cookie-cutter designs that don't offer much variety.

There are goodies inside the toolbox, too, including a separate case that holds a number of pass-through four-pin peripheral and floppy cables. These give the Type R a measure of pseudo-modular cabling in that users have some freedom to tweak cable configurations. Separating this small collection of cables from the big bundle doesn't do much to reduce clutter inside a case, though.

The Type R maintains consistent DC voltages when hooked into the beast. At worst, the 12V line deviates by 166 millivolts, which is a little under 1.4% and well within Hiper's +/- 5% tolerance.

AC Ripple looks good, even under our heaviest loads.

And we have our second power supply deliver greater than 80% efficiency when up against The Beast. The Type R starts out at 83.5% efficiency and slowly drops to 80.6% as we move from a 25 to 100% load.