Super Flower unveiled a new PSU at Computex 2024 that blows other consumer power supplies out of the water. Sporting a whopping 2800W rating, Super Flower's new Leadex SF-2800F14HP 3.1 has enough power and enough 12V-2x6 connectors to handle four RTX 4090 graphics cards all by itself. 1200W and 1600W power supplies have long been some of the highest rated units (in terms of power supplied) that you can buy for the consumer market. If you really need more than that, you've usually had to opt for a server PSU, but Super Flower feels there's room for this in the consumer market. Will it make our list of the best power supplies? Only if you're building something more than a typical PC.
The SF-2800F14HP has five voltage rails in total, including +3.3V, +5V, -12V, and +5VSB rails. The first two rails are good for a combined output of 120W, while the latter two are capable of supporting 6W and 15W respectively. The +12V holds the vast majority of the power, with a maximum output of 2799.6W all by itself.
The power supply supports a whopping 19 rear power connectors in total. Seven 8-pin connectors are dedicated to 8-pin EPS and PCIe power, and five 6-pins and a single 8-pin are dedicated to SATA and PERIF devices. For GPUs sporting the new 12VHPWR or 12V-2x6 connector (the latter is backward compatible with the former), Super Flower's new 2800W unit supports four 12V-2x6 connectors, enabling you to connect up to four 16-pin compatible graphics cards. (Or two if you happen to use one of the relatively few graphics cards that require two 16-pin connectors.)
Despite its high power rating, SuperFlower's new unit is only designed to support a single PC, featuring just one 24-pin connector. That could be a turn-off for some of Super Flower's customers who want a single high-wattage unit to drive multiple systems. But this new unit was never intended to fulfill that role obviously. Rather, this new unit is aimed at high-performance enthusiast and workstation systems that feature a plethora of PCIe devices, including multiple high-performance GPUs.
The power supply will be particularly useful for machine learning builds, which are normally comprised of two, three, or even four AI GPUs like the RTX 4090. Basically, AI likes high-end cards with as much VRAM as possible, preferably with AI processing like what you can get from Nvidia's tensor cores.
Beyond ports and power capacity, the Leadex SF-2800F14HP 3.1 is unsurprisingly 80 Plus Platinum certified, which is one of the highest certifications a PSU can have beyond the flagship Titanium spec. That means the PSU will have very good power efficiency, especially when running at 40% to 80% of its maximum power rating. The unit also supports the ATX 3.1 specification, which means it includes at least one 12V2x6 power connector (not the older 12VHPWR connector).
Something else to note is that most typical 120V circuits in U.S. houses are only rated for 15A. The maximum amount of power you can draw from a 15A circuit is only 1,800W, and that's not including PSU efficiency. Meaning, an 1600W PSU running at 92% efficiency could actually draw 1740W from the outlet. And this 2800W PSU at 92% efficiency could pull 3,043W. You'll definitely need a 25 Amp circuit to run this, and even then you wouldn't want it at 100% load — and you wouldn't want anything else on the circuit either. Think of it as something like a typical electrical dryer than needs its own 30A 240V circuit.
Super Flower advertises the use of full Japanese capacitors throughout the unit. Japanese capacitors are regarded as the highest-quality caps in the world and are a prime go-to for making high-performing yet reliable power supplies. We didn't get information on pricing or availability, but we expect Super Flower's new 2800W to be very pricey, well beyond what a normal extreme PSU goes for — and with the Leadex 1600W going for $289, we'd expect the 2800W model to easily more than double that price.
